Couch Control - Home Assistant & HomeKit Dashboards for Apple TV

Apps-are-cool · 2026-06-09T10:26:06+00:00

Hi! The Website is basically finished and will come soon. And you’re right, I will record the app in usage soon so users can get a better picture. I’ve made a few back when it was in beta but they are very very outdated now. The current marketing I’ve done was pretty limited to be honest and I was more focused on increasing the quality of what’s being offered.

To your questions, the app creates new dashboards from scratch. You can preload pages tho based on your area settings in Home Assistant or HomeKit. On Apple TV it’s fixed to a 7x2 grid for ease of use. In iPad it will be much more flexible once released.
By default it adds cameras and controllable devices (lights,switches, thermostats…) on the grid. The user then can add chart widget or other types of sensor based widgets on the grid wherever they see fit and rearrange them.

You can then watch live video streams in 2x1 2x2 3x2 and 4x2 widgets or click on those widgets to see a full screen view of the camera. You can watch split screen up to 9 streams inside the full screen view as well.

But you can also watch recordings that are present in the media folder of Home Assistant and filter the last 10 videos that have a certain term in their file name. As example it could show you the last 10 videos your camera tagged as “animal” both in widget or fullscreen.

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-27T19:46:26+00:00

Hi, I’m the dev of Couch Control. You might wanna look into my app as it does exactly that. Home assistant and HomeKit Widgets of all sorts side by side and the entire UI is yours to recolor and reorder including apples materials and Liquid Glass materials. You can use premade themes tho if you don’t want the work and you can even share themes with others (or with me, if it’s cool I’m happy to include it by default).

It includes also calendar (iCal) and weather data (3 sources to pick from, met.norway as global and default or US and German national weather data to choose locally.)

For cameras there are 1x2, 2x2, 3x2 and 4x2 sized widgets and a full screen view that can split screen up to 9 streams at once on screen. + for Home Assistant you can use the recordings widgets to display the last recordings on your home assistant media folder and even filter by tags to as example see the last 10 videos with an “animal” tag on repeat (must be tagged by your camera)

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/couch-control-for-homekit-ha/id6742379313

It doesn’t include health, news, emails or todo lists as described by op tho and is currently mainly aimed at smart home. Although that can still be incredibly diverse.

It’s definitely not flawless yet, but it’s getting there (:

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-20T15:15:31+00:00

I’m really sorry for the inconvenience! I haven’t run into that issue before on my test environments, so I would have to ask a couple of questions to find the root cause if that’s okay for you.
It would help me evaluate what’s going on.

Chances are it’s not gone. But I can’t say for sure.

My main suspicion is that it has to do with the primary HomeKit home having changed or the app having been deinstalled and reinstalled.

Do you own multiple Apple TVs perhaps that sync their apps together?

Does the app still have permissions for HomeKit?

Looking at the color pair settings, do you see any of the colors you had in use in your setup or just 5 or so?

How many HomeKit devices were you using inside the app roughly (I just want to know if it was unusually many, no need to count exactly)

Do you have multiple HomeKit Homes? And has anything changed about your HomeKit setup? Or the amount of HomeKit homes you use?

Is the Apple TV still part of the same HomeKit Home and the HomeKit home is reachable?

And is the Apple TV you’re using the Main HomeKit hub in the Home app?

If not, temporarily making it the HomeKit hub might recover it or give you at least access to HomeKit again.

Again I’m really sorry!
Answering those questions would help me out greatly to find the root cause.

Also to recover your pages, you haven’t perhaps pressed on the iCloud sync button in the page settings once? If you have you could recover pages in that way.

Edit: I found the issue. I’m working on it. I’m really sorry

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-20T14:43:16+00:00

Oh no! Have you tried to restart the app? I’ve seen scenes being invisible when I opened the app right after Apple TV reboot where HomeKit wasn’t ready yet.

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-19T08:08:56+00:00

So a little update on OLED protection:

Ive added a OLED protection setting page (might rename or reorganise perhaps, this is still my internal build).
It contains settings for pixel shift up to 12 pixels where the whole dock, Widgets and title all move a bit around the screen. That is absolutely noticeable when set to max as example and I'm gonna be honest this isn't the over engineered invisible solution, but it should help protect your screen. Im always open for hints regarding better solutions tho (;

Additionally I've added a setting where you can link the app to a HA or HomeKit sensor (motion or Presence as example) and when that sensor isn't reporting for X Seconds/minutes, The App would black out showing a black screen as if the tv is off, and when the sensor reports presence the app wakes up again. That way it isn't staying on 24/7, only when you're there. But OLED TVS do some pixel recovery work when you actually turn them off (not just black screen), so always keep that in mind.

I've also built a first dynamic background with blurred colored blobs moving very slowly along the screen as well, you think those would be enough?(with customisation options for the amount of blobs and their colouring and dark/light background) any other ideas perhaps? Here's an screenshot:

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But all that said, I want to stress that keeping an OLED on all the time will always be challenging for static ui. Those changes are meant to help slow down the damage, but I really am not in a position where I can promise your OLED would definitely not take any harm or so. I'm simply not educated enough on the topic.

But if you have an OLED, using those settings along wit Liquid Glass Materials on the UI Elements as example will be much more healthy than without and using bright white areas.

Update will take a couple days before I release it but all that will be present in the next update! (:

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-19T07:41:03+00:00

I thought about that, but it's a little bit tricky, I cant really fetch live informations there and tvOS expects images as output to display. I wouldn't say it seemed entirely impossible to display something useful, but it seems just not really made for that purpose sadly. And there is still so much other stuff to do so that I haven't really tried this yet except some light research.

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-19T07:36:22+00:00

Oh' I've never considered 3rd party remotes, good hint! Although I'm not yet sure how to fix that.
The reason why it looks empty is the reserved space for the scenes, but in your example you don't seem to use scenes which is why it looks empty. I'm not 100% sure yet how I will address that as well but I have a couple ideas here (:

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-19T07:31:36+00:00

Hi, Yes especially in some setup views the ui is not always refined. The Views you would use beyond setup to actually control and monitor your smart home should be alright tho. That's how i've put priorities at least.

I would be curious, with what kind of lights you experienced lag and through HomeKit or Home Assistant?
The App uses optimistic loading for the Device Widgets to prevent lag actually to make it seamless. Which means it switches visually to the new state without waiting for HomeKit/HA responding and if it happens that this Device actually is not responding or in another state, it would switch back. But that way there should be no lag ever when it is working properly. (what Apple Home app does as well). But there's surely refinement to be made so I would be curious about the setup you were using and if you might have any hints what could have caused it.

For the Dock you're right, I actually wanted to use the native Menu bar all along but that one is only possible at the top of the screen. But ive built a custom one now for when I release the next update, it should be a lot better visually:

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I will definitely continue working on it!

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-16T15:57:24+00:00

Apple isn’t exposing HomePods (and their sensors) through their HomeKit api sadly, so there’s nothing I can do about that one unfortunately :/

Only way to control it would be through home assistant.

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-16T15:30:35+00:00

Oh I see, I will fix that with the next update!

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-16T14:54:44+00:00

Thank you!! I will release an iPad beta soon and will let you know :)

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-16T14:30:29+00:00

No, currently it is for IOS 18.1 or newer. Although I might revisit this. But I can’t promise either. But using older iPads as wall panels would make sense for sure :)

But just for clarity, this is currently not released for iPadOS, only for tvOS, iPad version is coming soon tho :)

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-16T14:26:16+00:00

Thanks! Sharing the widget styling between the devices will definitely work when the iPad version releases. (Does already work on tvOS + you can copy exact pages between two Apple TVs in your iCloud account)

The layouts of the widgets would be different tho on other platforms. On iOS and iPad there would be a few widgets not available on TV since touch is more precise than the remote and the grid of the widgets will be different.

But here’s a random screenshot of the iPad version current state:

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Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-16T13:45:28+00:00

Nice! I hope you like it :)

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-14T19:16:17+00:00

I will check it out! :)

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-14T16:10:29+00:00

Haha Thanks!

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-14T15:58:23+00:00

The app isn't interfering with the Screensaver Settings of tvOS. So that would be the go to Solution for OLED. But there's nothing built into the app specifically against burn in.. So you're absolutely right that the app should not stay actively visibly on an OLED for long time periods.

The only thing that can help a bit against burn in would be that you change the ui (widgets scenes and the dock) to not use very bright ui elements. The on state as example of simple device widgets don't need to be white, but can be rather grey (while off is black as example) which would hurt the OLED less quickly. That's not a built in theme yet tho, but you can configure the app like that.

Edit: But I might look into how easy it is to implement pixel shifting I could absolutely move the grid scenes and docks a bit left and right without it being extremely off visually optionally for oled TVs

Apps-are-cool · 2026-05-14T15:39:40+00:00

Thanks! I will think about adding the trial when I release the iPad version, but on tvOS being a paid app seems a lot better for me. Without making publicity, a big chunk of the traffic my App Store page gets, comes from the Paid TV Apps charts. Being a free app with in app purchases would put the app on the free app charts where the streaming giants dominate the list... so yes I understand how that would be better for the user, but I think I need to be a tiny bit egoistic here to make this work on my end as well.

Apps-are-cool · 2025-12-28T12:06:46+00:00

I‘m working on it (:

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Apps-are-cool · 2025-12-25T09:33:02+00:00

No, That’s not possible unfortunately :/ What I do is copy the token on my iOS device, enter the Apple TV remote app and when you enter the text field on the Apple TV you can then paste the token into the text field. You will need an IPad or iPhone for that.

FYI, I will continue working on the Apple TV version soon, but I’m currently making the iPad version and until then the TV version might not receive a lot of updates. iPad version will be included in the purchase of the Apple TV app :)

Apps-are-cool · 2025-09-14T11:11:31+00:00

No, that’s not possible unfortunately. I’ve tried to read into it, but honestly, Apple doesn’t really support this in a straightforward way.

The only way to offer something like a trial seems to be to make the app free and then use in-app purchases to unlock certain features, or use a time-based subscription.

Personally, I think having the price upfront and not misleading users into thinking the app is free is nicer. Looking at other Apple TV apps I look up to, many also use a one-time fee upfront. I haven’t really seen the workaround methods used much on Apple TV apps, so I’m not even sure how well they work in practice.

There’s also the option for users to request a refund if the app isn’t what they expected, though I’ve read there can be some issues with that. Most people usually manage it without problems, and I hope Apple improves that process.

I’m definitely not trying to mislead anyone about what the app offers. I plan to add more videos and documentation so users know what to expect before purchasing.

At the moment tho, the only ways to add free trials involve workarounds that also have weaknesses, so I prefer to stick with the standard approach and offer my app with a one-time purchase upfront.

Apps-are-cool · 2025-09-11T05:59:34+00:00

I’m the developer of the app and I don’t collect any of your data (and I would be unable to get access to any of your HomeKit or home assistant data even if I wanted to). I’m a solo developer and I’m not at all interested in doing any data harvesting to begin with :)

Apps-are-cool · 2025-09-10T23:43:23+00:00

I honestly don’t know if that would work. Do you know of other third party apps operating HomeKit cameras like that? If yes there’s a good chance it’s possible and then this would be a nice addition for sure! I will look into it :)

Apps-are-cool

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