Frequently Asked Questions

Wallflower 3 is a fresh start: we rebuilt the app from the ground up. The new design is optimised for Liquid Glass, so during development we focused first on building and testing everything for iOS 26.

iOS 18 isn’t forgotten, though. Support is planned for an upcoming version; it didn’t make the 3.0 release because it needs its own round of testing. Once it arrives, Wallflower 3 will support devices dating all the way back to 2018.

iOS 17 is out of the question: the Dynamic Dashboard leans hard on SwiftUI’s flexible container views, which only arrived in iOS 18.

If you’ve had Wallflower before, the App Store offers the last compatible version on a device that can’t run iOS 26: Wallflower 2, which runs down to iOS 17 and keeps working as it is. It’s the same app in the store, so your purchases and subscription are good for both.

Below that, the ladder ends with Apple’s “new Home architecture”. It’s the reason Wallflower 2 needs iOS 17 in the first place. Wallflower 1 went all the way down to iOS 9, but newer iOS devices require the upgraded architecture, so most homes are upgraded by now, and an upgraded home is out of reach for devices that old.

If Wallflower is new to you, the old iPad alone won’t get you there: the App Store offers first-time downloads only in the current version, and that needs iOS 26. The trick: get Wallflower once on a device that runs iOS 26 (an iPhone is fine), and the old iPad can then install the newest version it can run from your purchase history.

New features land in Wallflower 3, though: an older iPad on the wall keeps doing its job, but at launch the new things need a device on iOS 26.

Wallflower 3 arrives as a regular update to the same app: nothing to reinstall, and your setup is migrated automatically. Your subscription and your one-time purchases carry over; there is nothing to buy again.

What changes is the app itself: instead of showing every accessory and sensor all the time, the new Dynamic Dashboard shows what matters right now and filters out the rest. You can pin what you always want to see, arrange everything in the new editor, and create custom dashboards of your own. And the free part grew: viewing and basic control of your Apple Home are now free for any number of devices.

The core is free: viewing and basic control of your Apple Home, plus some non-home features like guest Wi-Fi and the clock, with no limit on the number of devices.

Any purchase unlocks customisation: pinning, hiding, arranging, and creating custom dashboards. Wallflower Premium adds weather and calendar as a yearly subscription with a two-week free trial and Family Sharing, or as a more expensive monthly option. We encourage the yearly subscription: Wallflower runs on your wall, and it should run uninterrupted by billing hiccups. Home, Sweet Home is a one-time purchase that unlocks the home features for good, without weather or calendar.

The prices for your region are shown in the app and on the App Store.

Wallflower is on all day, every day. No app in your home works more hours. To keep developing it, as we have since 2019, we charge a subscription. The platform underneath an app keeps changing, and the subscription pays for the work of keeping up with it and for features with ongoing costs, like weather.

If you’d rather pay once, Home, Sweet Home unlocks the home features with a single purchase.

HomeKit is the mature smart home platform on Apple devices, and it runs locally: Wallflower controls your home even when the internet is down. Matter, the standard the whole industry has agreed on, slots right into it: Matter devices you add to your Apple Home show up in Wallflower automatically, with no explicit support needed.

Supporting Matter natively, without going through Apple Home, may become interesting in the future. No promises, but underneath everything, Wallflower is built with that in mind.

If it works with Apple Home, it works with Wallflower: lights, thermostats and air conditioners, switches, sockets, contact and motion sensors, cameras, TVs, and sensors for temperature, humidity, air quality and more.

That covers the big ecosystems like Philips Hue, IKEA, Eve and Aqara. And Matter opened the door wide: any Matter device can be added straight to Apple Home, and from there it shows up in Wallflower like every other accessory. Everything else reaches Apple Home through a bridge, including Home Assistant and Homebridge, which connect almost anything with a bit of DIY spirit.

You can, through a bridge. Several manufacturers make certified KNX-to-HomeKit bridges, and newer ones bridge KNX to Matter, which joins Apple Home just the same, and keeps your options open beyond it. Once one is in place, your KNX devices appear in Apple Home, and Wallflower treats them like any other accessory.

Wallflower shows what’s in your Apple Home. Many devices speak several ecosystems at once, especially Matter devices, which you can add to Apple Home and to Alexa or Google in parallel. Then Wallflower works right alongside your voice assistant. What it can’t do is show devices that live only in Alexa or Google and never reach Apple Home.

We take it as a compliment: a dashboard on the wall is such a good idea that Apple reportedly wants to make one. Wallflower runs full screen on the iPad you already own, at whatever size suits your wall, with the whole screen dedicated to your home. And it exists today: Wallflower has been on the App Store since 2019, and it took those years to make it what it is now.

If Apple does release such a device and opens it to third-party apps, we’d love to bring Wallflower to it. A dedicated screen made for the home would be the perfect platform for Wallflower.

The details that describe your home sync through iCloud: the symbols and room types you assign, device attributes (such as the colour temperature of a light that isn’t itself adjustable), and whether you’ve ignored a reachability warning. All of that describes your home, so it’s the same on every device.

Everything that shapes the display stays on the device: which dashboard it shows, custom dashboards, and the screen settings. Your wall panel and your phone do different jobs: the panel gets the family view, your phone the tiles you personally care about. Each is configured for its place.

Sync runs through your personal iCloud account, and we have no access to it. Because it is tied to your account, it doesn’t extend to other family members, even when your subscription does through Family Sharing.

Grouping is Apple Home’s job: put the lights into a group in the Home app using “Group with Other Accessories”, and the group appears in Wallflower as a single light: one tap, one brightness, for all of them.

The brightness slider for a group stays really smooth, even when the lamps start at different levels, take different times to react or throw errors. Everything follows as close to real time as it gets, and that’s no easy task.

And scenes work too, of course: one tile sets a whole mood.

Wallflower uses the camera for two optional features: detecting whether the room is dark and whether someone is looking at the device. Attention sensing brings back controls and lights up the background before you touch the screen. When nobody is looking, those elements stay out of the way.

For all that, Wallflower uses camera metadata for brightness and face detection. The app does not use the image itself: it is discarded immediately, never recorded or sent, and never reaches Wallflower’s app code. The metadata is produced in camera hardware next to the CPU: it is the same data the camera needs to adjust focus and aperture. That’s why the feature has no measurable effect on performance and works well even on very old devices.

Camera access is strictly opt-in. If you leave these features turned off, Wallflower works as usual.

One thing, though: if Wallflower faces an old oil portrait of your great-grand-uncle, it may always see a face. That’s why you can choose how large a face must be before it counts.

Yes!

• Our favourite is to cut the magnetic back out of an inexpensive “iPad Folio” from Amazon and mount that on the wall. It holds the iPad securely, costs little and is almost invisible. You can still lift the device off and use it as a regular iPad.

• Matthias Petrat 3D-prints angled brackets that hold an iPad and hide its power supply.

• For an iPhone, there is an almost endless choice of MagSafe and Qi2 accessories.

• For public places, choose a lockable mount such as one from Smart Things.

This is called Guided Access, an iOS feature that locks the device into a single app. Turn it on once in Settings → Accessibility → Guided Access, then triple-click the top button while using Wallflower, or the Home button on an older model. The iPad is now a wall panel: home gestures no longer leave the app, and only another triple-click followed by your passcode or Face ID ends the session.

Wallflower knows when it is running this way. It can hide its settings completely in Guided Access, and its screen behaviour has a dedicated mode for it. Apple explains how to use Guided Access.

Mostly you won’t need one: Wallflower keeps the screen awake itself, and you decide when: always, only in Guided Access or on a schedule.

If you’d rather let the iPad sleep, there is a trick. Lock the iPad into Wallflower with Guided Access, allow the screen to sleep with the Idle Lock setting under Screen & Security, and turn on notifications from the Home app for your motion sensor. When a notification arrives, the iPad wakes. Because it is locked into Guided Access, it wakes straight into Wallflower and the notification itself never appears. There is no guarantee that iOS will keep behaving this way, but it worked when we last tested it on iOS 26.

We think settings on a shared or public device should be protected from unauthorised tinkering. If the settings stay open for a while, Wallflower closes them automatically after some time without interaction. And you can protect access with Face ID, Touch ID or a password set right in the app, which is easier to share in a family or organisation than biometrics. Protection is optional; without it, the settings are simply open. For any of this to be effective, consider locking your device into Wallflower with Guided Access.

Your devices have an invisible “Kiosk Mode”. The maximum charge of the battery is automatically reduced once iOS detects that it’s permanently on a charger. It’s still displayed as 100%, but in reality the battery is maintained at an optimal charging level for storage. Learn more about kiosk mode directly from Apple.

Really.

Almost all of Wallflower’s code is ours or comes with iOS. The little code we use from elsewhere was picked because we know it isn’t doing weird things behind our back. There are no frameworks that phone home. We believe in learning from user feedback, not from tracking data.

Yes. We write the English and German versions ourselves; AI helps us translate the app and website into every other language.

For a small studio, supporting this many languages used to be out of reach: not only because of the cost, but because every small release requires another pass through every language. AI makes that work fit the quick, iterative way we develop apps.

The quality looks remarkably good in the languages we can judge ourselves. For the languages we don’t speak, we depend on you: if anything sounds wrong, awkward or unclear, please tell us. We’d genuinely like to make it better.

Apple’s HomeKit has nice APIs for apps like Wallflower, and iOS is flexible and powerful. Devices remain easy to find years later (a used iPad can be quite cheap), older hardware stays well supported, and there is a huge ecosystem of accessories and wall mounts. It is highly unlikely that we can build an app like Wallflower on a platform other than iOS.

Please tell us if you want Wallflower on one of these platforms, so we can plan development accordingly. We can’t promise or announce anything, but if demand and resources are there, we’d love to bring Wallflower there, too.

Yes. A running clock is a continuity problem on a set: it jumps from take to take and from cut to cut. That’s why Wallflower can lock its date and time with “Lock Date and Time” in Advanced Settings: every shot shows the same time, no matter when it was filmed. Planning a production? Email us, we’re happy to help.

That’s exactly the kind of project we take on. Wallflower is built on internal frameworks made for exactly this kind of flexibility, so a version with your branding, your special devices or your building’s quirks is a conversation we’d like to have. Email us.

Tell us! Just email hello@nxtbgthng.com. We can’t promise or announce anything, but we read everything, and user ideas keep landing on the roadmap.

No problem! Just email hello@nxtbgthng.com. If it keeps coming up, we’ll add it here, too. Thanks!