What it does
- Lives in the menu bar. Click the house icon and a panel drops down; click anywhere else and it is gone.
- Your floor plan in 3D. Rooms, walls, doors, windows and furniture are built from one JSON file. Turn it all the
way round and move it around: on the Mac drag to turn, two fingers on the trackpad to move, pinch to zoom.
Lamps light the scene the way they light the room; an AC that is running blows visible air.
- Lights. Tap to toggle, drag across a tile to dim, open a light for brightness, white temperature and colour.
- Air conditioners. Power, target temperature, mode and fan speed, with the room temperature from a real sensor if you have one.
- Scenes. One tap sets every light and AC — "Cozy", "Movie", "Night", or your own.
- A visual editor. Draw the rooms, drop in furniture, place lamps and ACs, and link each one to a real device.
- Your devices, wherever they live. Smart Life / Tuya, Home Assistant (and the thousands of brands it runs),
Philips Hue and Apple Home — mixed freely in one home. See Connect real devices.
- An island around the notch. Rest the pointer on the MacBook's notch and a small live model of the home drops
out of it, with scenes and every device one click away. See The island.
- AI Access. Give ChatGPT, Claude or any AI assistant a private link — or connect it over MCP — and it runs your
lights and air conditioners, and rebuilds rooms in the 3D model from your photos. Served by your Mac; Stop ends it.
See AI Access.
- Widgets and controls. The home in 3D on the iPhone's Home Screen and the Mac's desktop, scenes, lamps and
air conditioners a tap away, Lock Screen and Control Center controls, and quick actions on the app icon.
See Widgets.
- An iPhone app that needs no Mac. Draw the home, connect Smart Life, Home Assistant, Hue and Apple Home and
link the devices, all on the phone. Pair a Mac later and both stay in sync, whichever one you edit.
See iPhone app.
- Works without any hardware. Until you sign in, every device is simulated, so you can try everything first.
Both apps are a small native Swift shell (AppKit on the Mac, SwiftUI on the iPhone) around one
Three.js web UI, and share their device clients and sync as a Swift package.
No frameworks, no Electron, no server, no account of its own.
Download
- Get
HouseControl-<version>.dmg from Releases.
It runs on macOS 13 or newer, Apple silicon and Intel.
- Open it and drag House Control into Applications.
- Open House Control from Applications. The first time, macOS stops it with “Apple could not verify…”,
because the app is not signed with a paid Apple Developer ID (see why).
Allow it once:
- macOS 15 Sequoia and newer: click Done, open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down
to “House Control was blocked…”, click Open Anyway and confirm with your password.
- macOS 13–14: Control-click the app in Applications, choose Open, then Open again.
- Or, in Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/House Control.app"
- Look for the house in the menu bar — there is no Dock icon and no window. Click it.
What is new in each release: CHANGELOG.md.
It starts with a bundled demo plan, so you can try everything before connecting anything. Then:
make it your home and connect real devices.
To start it with your Mac, add it under System Settings → General → Login Items.
Check what you downloaded
Every release image is built by GitHub Actions from the tagged commit — not on
anyone's Mac — and comes with its SHA-256 and a signed build provenance attestation:
shasum -a 256 -c HouseControl-<version>.dmg.sha256
gh attestation verify HouseControl-<version>.dmg --repo 0xProbabillity/house-control
The second command proves the image was built by this repository's workflow, and shows from which commit.
Images from 1.0.0 on carry an attestation; 0.1.0 was built while the repository was still private, when GitHub
does not store attestations for free accounts, so for it only the SHA-256 can be checked.
Why the app is not notarized
Notarizing needs an Apple Developer ID, and that certificate carries a person's legal name inside every copy of
the app. House Control ships signed ad hoc instead, and earns trust the open-source way: the code is all here,
the release is built in public, and you can build it yourself in a couple of minutes.
Remove it
Quit it (right-click the menu bar icon → Quit), delete House Control from Applications and, to remove your
plan and connections too, ~/Library/Application Support/HouseControl/.
Requirements
| |
|---|
| macOS | 13 Ventura or newer |
| Xcode Command Line Tools | Swift 5.9 or newer — xcode-select --install |
| Node.js | 20.19+ or 22.12+ |
| For the iPhone app | Xcode 16 or newer, XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen), iOS 17+ |
Build and run
git clone https://github.com/0xProbabillity/house-control.git
cd house-control
./scripts/build-app.sh
open build/HouseControl.app
The script builds the web UI with Vite, the native shell with SwiftPM, and assembles an ad-hoc signed
build/HouseControl.app. The first build downloads the npm packages; later builds take a few seconds.
The app is signed ad hoc. If you rebuild often and use iPhone sync, sign it with your own certificate instead, so
macOS does not ask for the Local Network permission after every build:
CODESIGN_IDENTITY="Apple Development: [email protected] (ABCDE12345)" ./scripts/build-app.sh.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
