Story

Hey HN!

Nick here – developer of Itsyhome, a menu bar app for macOS that gives you control over your whole HomeKit fleet (and very soon Home Assistant). I run 130+ HomeKit devices at home and the Home app was too heavy for quick adjustments.

Full HomeKit support, favourites, hidden items, device groups, pinning of rooms/accessories/groups as separate menu bar items, iCloud sync – all in a native experience and tiny package.

Open source (https://github.com/nickustinov/itsyhome-macos) and free to use (there is an optional one-time purchase for a Pro version which includes cameras and automation features).

Itsyhome is a Mac Catalyst app because HomeKit requires the iOS SDK, so it runs a headless Catalyst process for HomeKit (and now Home Assistant) access while using a native AppKit plugin over a bridge protocol to provide the actual menu bar UI – since AppKit gives you the real macOS menu bar experience that Catalyst alone can't.

It comes with deeplink support, a webhook server, a CLI tool (golang, all open source), a Stream Deck plugin (open source, all accessories supported), and the recent update also includes an SSE event stream (HomeKit and HA) - you can curl -N localhost:8423/events and get a real-time JSON stream of every device state change in your home.

Home Assistant version is still in beta – would anyone be willing to test it via TestFlight?

Appreciate any feedback and happy to answer any questions.