Couch Control - HomeKit & Home Assistant on Apple TV
Hello everyone, I wanted to give an Update on the current state of Couch Control for Apple TV. There were a lot of improvements, fixes, new Onboarding, new widgets or new full screen views added to the app since version 1.0 including iCal Calendars, New Weather data sources or a way to create themes and share them with others to recreate the exact same style widget wide.
https://apps.apple.com/de/app/couch-control-for-homekit-ha/id6742379313
What is Couch Control
Couch control allows you to create highly customisable dashboards on your Apple TV using Home Assistant, HomeKit, iCal Calendars and Weather Data (Brightsky (DWD), Norway met(global) and the US national weather service).
All those can sit side by side on the same page.
Widgets
You can add Chart widgets, camera streams, media players, simple device widgets, calendar widgets or sensor based widgets and arrange them however you see fit. The Widget Grid is set to 7x2 spots and widgets go from 1x1 up to 4x2 sized Widgets. By long pressing the widgets you get the tvOS native context menu to control percentage, light colours or many others detailed controls for your devices (if you're missing something, let me know!). but you can also change the widgets styling or icons with near infinite options.
First Install
When first installing the app you are met with the choice which pre-made style you want to use and which Home Assistant and HomeKit rooms to create inside of Couch Control. A page will be created for each selected room including all the controllable devices inside of that room. Sensors aren't automatically added, those you have to add yourself through going to Settings - Add Widget and selecting a sensor displaying widget of your choice. You can then either use the preconfigured style and layout as it is, or change it however you want!
Customisation
Pretty much all the ui elements inside the widgets can be coloured and styled to your liking to create unique themes that you can even share with others by exporting/importing a theme file. In order to make onboarding easier, there are several prebuilt themes in the app by default you can just use without needing to change any visual settings. But if you want to, you can customise each widget uniquely, choose certain color combinations for certain device categories or just color everything in the same colours. By using the "Apply to All Widgets buttons" you can apply styling settings you applied to one widget to many widgets at once. Meanwhile pressing that button also affects the widgets you will add to this Page in the future so everything looks coherent.
Full screen views
In order to elevate the experience a bit further, there are several full screen views for sensor charts, weather, HA Media players or a simple file browser to let you access all aspects of your Home assistant server from your TV.
Privacy
100% local. Direct connections only — HomeKit via Apple’s native API, Home Assistant via WebSocket. No cloud relay, no telemetry, no data collection.
Price
7.99$ one time payment. No hidden costs or subscriptions. iPad Version coming soon as well and included in the price :)
I would love to hear what you guys think and if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask!