Why is iOS 17 the minimum version?

Apple introduced the “New Home Architecture” which vastly improved HomeKit performance and reliability, especially for Apps like Wallflower. One side effect is that once this is activated, devices below iOS 16 cannot access the HomeKit setup anymore, so supporting them with Wallflower does not make any more sense.

iOS 17 massively increased the reliability of the SwiftUI framework that Wallflower is based on and introduced major features that would have needed Wallflower to switch to that as a minimum sooner rather than later. With such a major change like switching from an iOS 9 minimum, it made sense to switch to iOS 17 altogether.

What’s with Wallflower 1 that worked on iOS 9 to 16?

If you loaded this version in the past, you should be able to still download it if you log into the AppStore on the old devices. Your subscription should be valid for Wallflower 1 and 2, so are your In-App-Purchases; after all it’s the same app in the store, and nothing changed in the business model.

If you want to get version 1.2 now, without having done it in the past, it is unfortunately not possible. Those are Apples rules, not mine… But as the new HomeKit architecture is so much more reliable, so getting Wallflower on iOS 17 is an overall far better experience!

What is HomeKits “New Architecture”?

Before the new Home Architecture any HomeKit app on your iOS device communicated directly with the devices in your home, like thermostats or your bridges. With bigger setups and more clients, this could overwhelm devices.

So in the “New Home Architecture” a “Home Hub” is standing in for your devices and acts as a proxy. This makes it much less likely for the little embedded controller in your thermostat to be overwhelmed, and everything is more reliable. A Home Hub can be an AppleTV or a HomePod, and you can have multiple of those, but you need at least one. All this was announced for iOS 16, and after some delays finally introduced with iOS 16.4. The downside is that this change is so fundamental that older iOS versions can’t be upgraded to use the new architectiure, so they are cut off from your HomeKit setup.

What about Matter?

Matter is the new Smart Home Standard, that basically everyone in the “Smart Home” industry agreed to support. Its structure is very close to HomeKit and it will replace HomeKit’s “HAP” protocol at some point.Your Matter devices will show up in HomeKit and Wallflower without explicit need for support in the app.

In the future, it makes a lot of sense to support Matter natively in addition to HomeKit. HomeKit is heavily restricted by Apple, there are a lot of things that Apple does not let 3rd party developers do. This is unexpected for most users, because Apple themselves can do those things. So far, this unfortunate policy seems not to apply to the way Apple integrated Matter. However, in its current state the Matter integration in iOS is clearly not done, and building a Matter app is magnitudes more complex than it has to be. But Wallflower is built with all that in mind, and should be ready to take advantage of Matter when things improve.

How do I select which devices Wallflower shows instead of showing what’s in a room or zone?

The left side of Wallflower is dedicated to showing your home. In addition to showing a room or a zone, you can show the whole home, but that’s only recommended for small setups. If you want to select specific devices, scenes or sensors, you can select “Individual” and chose what’s on display.

I want to quickly see what’s in another room!

Tap on the room name to temporarily set the interface to another room. It will switch back to your default room after some while. To permanently change the default view, use the settings.

I have temperature sensors inside and outside that should not be merged into one graph. Generally, I have a lot of ideas on how the graphs and sensors could be better.

So do I. Wallflower’s graphs are based on a self-made framework that I call GraphKit, and it’s abut 80% where I want it to be. During development, Apple introduced Swift Charts which, coincidentally is also providing about 80% of what I need. I decided that I’ll switch to that, so that I can make use of all the future enhancements of that framework. Sensors and Graphs will be improved in a future version, but so far I decided to ship the existing Graphs.

Can you recommend a wall mount?

Yes!

• My favorite is actually cutting the magnetic back of a knock-off “iPad Folio” from Amazon and put that on the wall. It holds the iPad securely, is cheap, almost invisible and you can just grab the device and use it as a regular iPad.

• Matthias Petrat 3d prints angled brackets that you can put an iPad in and that also hides the power supply.

• If your device is an iPhone, you have an almost endless choice of MagSafe and Qi2 accessories.

• For public locations where you don’t want your iPad to be stolen, there exist a few products that lock it securely, like Smart Things

How do I lock my iPad into running Wallflower so that other apps can’t be accessed?

This is called “Guided Access”, and you can learn more about it here. Wallflower can completely hide its settings when in this mode.

How does Wallflower protect its settings?

We think that on a public device the settings should be protected from unauthorized tinkering. So if the settings are open for a while, they are automatically closed after some time of inactivity. And Wallflower uses Touch ID or Face ID where available to prevent access to its settings. If you don’t want to use biometric authentication, then just deny the permission – the settings are then freely available. As an additional option you can set a password which is easier to share in your family or organization than biometry. However, for all those options to be effective you should consider locking your device into the Wallflower app – see above.

Do you really use the camera? How does it work? And what if I don’t want that?

Wallflower uses the camera for two things: Seeing if the room is dark and if the device is being looked at. The latter is for detecting attention and adding interactive elements or lighting up the background before you even touch the screen. Because when you look at Wallflower from afar, you don’t need these elements to clutter the screen. One thing though: If you put Wallflower on the opposite wall of that huge oil portrait of your great grand uncle, it might detect a face all the time. This feature won’t work correctly then. :-)

For all that it uses the cameras metadata. The image itself is not used by the app, nor is it recorded or sent – it is immediately discarded and not touched by app code. Actually, the metadata, which includes face detection and lumiosity, is generated in hardware besides the CPU – its the data the camera needs to adjust focus and aperture. So this feature doesn’t even have a measurable performance impact and works really well on really old devices.

All camera usage is completely opt-in and of course you can deny camera access and the app still works – just without these features. It’s up to you.

Where’s the Android version?

Apple’s HomeKit has nice APIs for Apps like Wallflower, the OS is flexible and powerful, devices are easy to come by even after years, they are relatively cheap (well, iPads…), older devices are still well supported and there is a huge ecosystem of accessories and wallmounts. It is highly unlikely we can build an app like Wallflower on a different platform than iOS.

Wallflower on the AppleTV would be cool. Or Vision Pro! And while we’re at it: What about the Mac?

Please tell me if you want Wallflower on these platforms, so I can align development resources. I can’t promise or announce anything, but if demand and resources are there I’d love bring Wallflower there, too.

Really, no tracking? Not even a little bit?

Really.

Almost all code is by us or comes with iOS. All other code we used we picked because we know it’s not doing weird things behind our back. There are no frameworks that phone home. We believe in learning from user feedback, not from tracking data.

Will Wallflower kill my iPad’s battery?

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 being maintained at an optimal charging level for storage.

Woah, that’s a pricey app! Can’t it be cheaper?

When we decided to make Wallflower, it was clear that this can’t be a hobby project, it has to generate revenue. We don’t want to do it with advertising, and we don’t want to collect any data – we strongly believe that your home is a private space. We like the old-school “indie developer” business model, where the user direcly pays for the app. We don’t want to take up Venture Capital either – this shouldn’t be a growth focused operation, we don’t want to have to compromise on our users needs for the sake of making a stakeholder happy. And we don’t want Wallflower to be one of those apps that start well and then disappear because it wasn’t worth it to develop them further. All this has a price.

Other developers usually love to compare a price like this to one coffee per month. We like to compare it to the price of one a smart light switch per year. With that you support the contiuous development of an app you see and use every day. And we have plenty of ideas for features we want to add in the future.

Sure, but does it have to be a subscription? I want to pay once and be done with it!

The reality of making an app is that in addition to adding new features, the underlying system is a moving target. As much as we’d like to “charge money once and never again”, we would need to combine it with “do the work once and never again” – and that’s not what reality is like. Even in a model, where we charge for updates from time to time and keep the old versions around for people who don’t want the updates, we’d need to support multiple versions in parallel. That’s even more expensive to do.

But I really don’t like subscriptions!

We know. We think an app requiring a subsription should be an app that you see and use every day, not an app on the 3rd page of your home screen that you forget about after a week. If that’s our app: Don’t pay. But if you put Wallflower on the wall, have it on all day and use it in your daily life, we think it’s worth it. Ans ome features like weather are actually paid for per use – we can’t give that away for free.

If you want to use the home features only and want to pay them once and be done with it, there is an option pay a higher one-time fee for those. After all, a light switch is also something that you install once and then use as long as it’s there. However, you will miss out on some of the other features like weather and calendar integration.

I have a question that isn’t answered here!

No problem! Just send me a mail to hello@nxtbgthng.com. If your question gets asked more frequently, I’ll add it here, too. Thanks!