Hands-On with ThorBolt X1 & Brilliant Gen 2, Plus Maisomage App Developer Interview
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Welcome everybody to another exciting episode of HomeKit Insider. You've got me, your host as always, Andrew O'Hara. And joining me this week, my original guest fell through, but fortunately I put out the call on Twitter and my guest...

popped up very quickly. We have talked about them on the show before. So this is Thibaut Renier, who is the CEO of the company behind Mesomage, one of the great HomeKit apps, Apple Home apps that are out there. So we've talked about app updates on the show before, and now we have the CEO of the company joining. So Thibaut, thank you for joining. We're going to walk through the news as usual, and then we'll get to talking about some app stuff. Thank you, Andrew. Fine.

And you are right now in Europe. So I extra appreciate this because this is later in the day and you are still signing in to take this call. So again, thank you so much for stepping in here. And I think we got a lot of fun stuff to talk about today. Per usual, I guess. Thank you.

Well, I guess let's start with TVOS stuff. This happened like right at the end, right last week when I was on with Dan and Mark Gurman, you know, he did his thing where he releases things right after I've already recorded. So we couldn't touch on it very much. But maybe this is a little bit of an obvious thought, perhaps, but he is confirming that a TVOS redesign is also coming at WWDC, which...

I'm super excited about. We have been very focused on Apple's new glassy appearance coming to things like iOS, iPad, OS, and the Mac and making all those kind of look more unified. Um, maybe pulling inspiration from vision to as vision pro, but this is the first time that we've heard, you know, really confirmation that TVOS will be touched in the same way. And there frankly hasn't been an update to TVOS is overall appearance, uh,

basically since like the new generation, right? Since we went away from the really long skinny one that was like the old school, like Mac minis. Now it's like the tiny little black boxes, but it hasn't really changed since then. So I'm all about this. I think this is great. German also mentions watchOS is getting somewhat of a redesign. So just really across every Apple operating system, uh,

This makes sense. So I'm pretty excited about this. Do you use an Apple TV, Thibaut? Of course, yeah. Because the Apple TV and HomePods are the home hubs for HomeKit, so it's mandatory to have them. And that's why, also, we developed Mesomesh for Apple TV because that's a screen that you can have and you can want to change the light or the settings of your home or close your windows,

blinds and so on. But what is funny, in fact, is that there was a big change in tvOS 18 regarding the tab bars. If you have a window with a tab bar, before, if you remember a while ago, it was a rectangle on the top of the screen just with text.

and the current tab was a different color. That was all. And now with tvOS 18, we have a real tab bar like on the iPads.

Oh, that's true, yeah. It comes from the Vision Pro interface. And iPadOS was also changed because the tabs were not designed like they are right now. And currently, iPadOS, tvOS and macOS 15 have the same kind of tab bar which are new. And if you look closely, you will see that there are shadows.

so the tab that is unlighted you have a rectangle a rounded rectangle around which is a white probably and with a shadow below so we we already had steps but there are small steps and in fact it was the testing team in our company that discovers that just after

putting another version of our app in our test environment, the tab bar was changed. So just using the latest Apple tools for making apps was changing the way it was displayed on new releases. So that's why if you have old apps on Apple TV, you still have the older way. But if you use new apps, then you have the new tab bar like you have in Apple Music, for instance.

True, and that is always like the benefit for, you know, some people do these really cool custom UIs, but when you're using Apple's native tools, native tab bars, everything like that, when Apple updates those designs, they just flow through your app. So that's such an easy way to get an upgraded UI without you really having to do anything at all, just rebuilding on, you know, tvOS 18. Yeah.

And the user doesn't have to guess how it works because it's new but it's the same way everywhere. What we wonder is how it will be on iPhones. Because on iPhones you still have the tab bar at the bottom, this grey bar, not always grey, but with tiny icons and really tiny text below. And perhaps this will change and this would be a major step, probably.

I think from, I mean, we're all taking this with a grain of salt, but I think what we saw from John Prosser was that Apple was going to be doing a floating tab bar. So similar to the tap bars that we have on iPad and Apple TV and such, but bring that to the iPhone and put it at the bottom of the screen within reach of your thumb. Then your content is going to flow under it and you're going to have that shadow effect of the bar hovering above the content.

I think that makes sense and that would continue that unification of that tab bar design across everything. On iPads, the tab bar is already floating on top. When you scroll, it's still on top. Yeah, so I think they brought that, like you said, I didn't realize that. I didn't even pay attention. They brought it to the Apple TV. They brought it to iPad last year, I think, and it makes sense that this year we would get it on the iPhone too.

This also kind of ties in with the previous rumor that we heard, which moves on to our next topic, which is Apple's Home Hub. Part of the reason for the delay, like that it was going to launch in spring, was the UI. If Apple refreshed the UI on this, it would kind of tip its hat on how things would look

you know, post WWDC. Now, if Apple were to launch this after WWDC, the whole unified look would make sense and it could, it could have one UI instead of having to update it post DubDub. So that makes sense to me. And of course, German said as well that this is on track to launch by the end of the year, but that's also, he's saying the end of the year at the earliest. So there still could be a 2026 launch, but it gives me that little bit more hope that,

that we will see this this year. And I'm curious, coming from your perspective, how do you feel about, right now the rumors are saying, no third-party apps at launch for Apple's Home Hub, but especially for a smart home app, you've got to be really eager to get Maison Maj onto the Apple Home Hub thing. Of course, of course, because that's a place where you would put such apps online.

And that's a place to use such apps. And when we see the jobs that Apple did for the Home app,

It was a great step forward, but it's not a perfect app at all. Especially from what we see, perhaps we... Now, I will talk about the Home app a little bit later, but about the Home app, what is really important, or perhaps which could explain a delay for third parties, is if there are apps for third parties,

then the API should be delivered in WWDC. Okay, so you still hope to get the APIs now, even if they don't launch right away. We'll see. In fact, what I think is that we will see if it's a tvOS or iPadOS-based this way also. Because if it's tvOS-based, they would be forced to announce it now to have third-party apps.

Because tvOS is not touch screened. So the new Home Hub will be HomePod. Yes. Home Hub will have touch screen to be convenient. And then tvOS is not touch screened. Some things must change. If it's iPad based, then there is no need to specify how it will work. It will be just a few APIs. But

Then they would lock some apps to run on it. So I don't know what they plan. What is...

Interesting is that the HomePod uses the tvOS also, and perhaps it would be simpler to have tvOS on this thing. If you remember previously, the iPad could be a Home Hub. You could plug it to the socket and then have it powered and being used as a Home Hub, but now it's no longer available.

So I'm wondering if, just to be clear for your audience, the

A hub in HomeKit is a device that is always powered to manage automation. Without a hub, you can't have automations in your home. So that's why the Apple TV can be one because lots of people have Apple TVs. But if you don't have an Apple TV, then you can have at least one HomePod and the HomePod will manage the home as a hub.

The point is the Apple TV is more powerful, it could be wired so it's a better hub and now we can choose in the home setting which device should be the forced hub. Before it was automatic and sometimes it was a home pod in the garden that was the home hub and now it's way better.

That's true. I do kind of miss it. It is on that. It's not on iPad any longer, but I think it makes sense. I think it was too confusing of like if people were using that as their main home hub and then it was left unplugged and then now it's no longer going to work. You literally needed to keep it plugged in.

all of the time. And at that point, they just might as well make what they're making, some sort of smart display with a touchscreen. I think tvOS is going to be the base. I think we've seen the work already between the new interface switcher for the screensavers. I think that is what that is. I think the same thing with Control Center. I forgot about that. That added with tvOS 18.

I think that's, again, a preview of what's going to make perfect sense on this smart display. So it'll be really interesting. We're getting close. We'll see if we have any new clues coming out of DubDub. But if there is no announcement at DubDub, you will know that there will be no apps. That's for sure. True.

Well, I'm sure there's going to be, you know, stuff is always left in the code. We've seen everything from like Apple renaming, you know, their operating systems that was came out this week. So like, I'm hoping we get a little, little nitpicks, a little more information from these first developer betas. Maybe Apple, maybe their way around it is they introduced their home OS, right? And the home OS adds the touchscreen stuff and everything.

they don't have to maybe publicize it necessarily that it's meant for a smart display, but we'll all know it. We'll know it. So my second point, if you don't mind, is about the job Apple did for the Home app. Because right now we are a bit in a remote control home. It's not smart at all because you say, oh, I want to switch on the light. I take my phone, I press a button. I want to change the color. I take the phone, I change the color.

And then you just press buttons every time for everything. And if I have one million colors in my light, I don't want to choose the color each time I read, each time I eat, each time I work.

or each time I watch TV. So that's why they had made scenes, but the Home app is crap for scenes because you see two and a half scenes for your home. How do you want to manage your home that way? And if they do a Home Hub in such a way, it won't be really great. It would just be a control panel to press some buttons.

That's true. That's what we think, in fact. I think they're eventually going to have to get to the spot where they're using the – we saw this a little bit already with Control Center where we're getting the predictive scenes based on your usage. Like literally every time I go upstairs and I like go to go to bed and it's like, do you want to run the good night scene? I'm like, yes, I do. It knows everything.

And I feel like that predictive AI is where Apple's going to tiptoe in next. And we're going to see that come out a little bit with the smart home hub. But I mean, you nailed it. We're really in a remote controlled home, not a smart home. The fact that I can't ask Apple's assistant to do two things at the same time drives me crazy. I want to just say, turn on the living room lights and open the window to 75%. And I can't do that. I have to say, turn on the living room lights.

Wait for that to happen and then say, open the living room blinds to 75%. I have to do two separate commands with a pause in between waiting for that command to finish running. And it's ridiculous. So at a minimum, I'm going to need that to get fixed sooner rather than later.

Okay, we have more news from third-party stuff, and I wanted to, real quick, go hands-on with this showed up literally like an hour ago, so I have not had time to play with it, but I can at least hold it up. So if anyone's watching the video, they can check this out. But this is the Thorbolt X1. It is a smart deadbolt that uses HomeKit or Apple Home over Thread, and it supports HomeKey, which is fantastic. It also has a fingerprint reader in it, and the whole thing is $130, which I'm...

frankly really impressed with that you can get a Thread Apple Home Deadbolt for $130 with Homekey in there as well. So here's what it looks like. It is a little bit bulky, I would say, compared to some of the other ones, but the part facing the camera now is the outside. You have a little NFC logo at the top

That you can tap your watch or your phone to authenticate via home key. Then down below that, we have this little spot where you can press on the side and it like counter levers out and hidden behind that. You're going to have a sealed key.

So you can use a physical key to get into this. And there's a USB-C port, which is going to be your backup power. So you have power supply as well as physical key, just like you would a lot of door locks. So that's handy, but I also like that it's hidden behind that little panel. So from the front, this looks super, super clean. It's just a matte black color.

and there's a little circle in the bottom right-hand corner with a light around it. That's your fingerprint reader. So tap it with your finger. You can authenticate that way. If you don't use Homekey or anything, you have family members that they are not accessing with the actual Homekey.

home app or anything or with home key you can give them fingerprint access and enroll them that way also has passcode so when it turns on there's a big passcode screen right in the middle where you can enter your passcode enter that way this will hold 60 passcodes and it'll do 100 individual fingerprints so you can enroll multiple of your fingers so if you're carrying things you can still get in with like the tip of your pinky and it'll still work ipx5 resistance on there

You can manage access in Apple Home, which includes giving access to people. And they're saying 18 months of battery life on this with eight AA batteries. So the back part here on video, we're showing the back part. It's got a silver throw that you can use to lock and unlock. And above that, you have your HomeKit code and where the keys go.

I will say weird placement of the home kit code. Look at that, Tivo. It's like right on the inside of the lock. Like they didn't even put it inside the battery compartment. So like I would, of course, just peel off the sticker because I don't want a sticker right on the inside of my door lock. So I think that's a little funny of a placement for the sticker to go, but it is what it is.

I'm still impressed. $130 for a home key lock. There's not that many home key ones out there. I think this is a really great way to get into that for a pretty affordable price. Feels a little on the plastic-y side because, you know, it's a more affordable product, but...

I think this is nice. I think this is a pretty nice retrofit lock. So I'll have more in a full review later. Any first impressions, Thibaut, on this? We don't use such products right now because there are lots of them and the standards are just coming. And we are waiting to see what we can do with those dope bolts.

I know everything is different in the EU in terms of locks. Do you have a smart lock on your door, and which one do you go with? No, not yet. No? No. I know the Nuki, right, N-U-K-I, that's really popular in Europe. So that one always looks like a really nice one. Yeah, but we don't have the – yeah, we have different keys than you have in the U.S. Yeah. It's – yes. Yes.

But it's standard also. Like last time in one of your show, you talk about Aza Abloh. It's a brand. It's a big brand in Europe. So there are main actors everywhere. So...

Yeah, that is a big one. We're seeing so many smart locks launch. I feel like I was just inundated with them at CES. So we're going to keep seeing some more. I still have the level lock with home key on my door. And part of me, like I do test all these on different doors for periods of time. And part of me like wants to switch over my main door to try something else that has crazier things. But we've always been pretty solid with just the home key. If there's a good UWB one,

Maybe I'll switch to that. That'll maybe be something that'll finally get me to switch door locks because it's been pretty solid for a while. Well, next up in the news, we have TP-Link. TP-Link has their TAPO TP-H500. This is a hub. It is primarily for TAPO devices. So anything in like the TP-Link TAPO line, but also third party matter ones. But it comes with an asterisk and this is kind of where things get confusing with matter from

From my understanding, this isn't necessarily bridging. Like, Aqara has Matterhubs. SwitchBot has Matterhubs. And with those, you connect certain devices to them, and then those can show inside of the Home app. Like, it would be like a Zigbee device or something. It'll add them. It'll add them through Matter into Apple Home. This isn't necessarily doing that. This is allowing you to have all of those devices show up inside of, like, the Tapbo app.

Because if you have a Matter device, you don't necessarily need...

a third party hub, you just add it right into, you know, Apple home. The only home hub you need, like you said, Tebow is your home pod or your Apple TV. That's all you need to be able to use them. So this is really for people who are in that TAPO TV link TAPO space. Uh, it has better over wifi, no thread. It'll connect 16 TAPO or TP link cameras to this thing and 64 smart sensors. Uh,

Again, just really meant for TP-Link devices. They also have a new deadbolt, the TAPO DL100, but I don't care about it because it doesn't support Apple Home. So it's not a, yeah, there's other locks. There's other locks out there. So just another hub. I feel like it just gets a little bit confusing with these, like the MatterHub situations on third-party stuff.

I don't know. And then you need another hub for another brand, and it's very complex, yeah. True. I'm trying to avoid adding hubs to my house. We're going to talk about more in a minute of them, but I have already the Hue, the Arlo, the Aqara, Lutron. I think that might be it. I think I might be holding at those four hubs.

Um, but sometimes I get pushed to try to, to add extra ones in there for fun new products. But I think right now I'm sitting at four third party hubs as well as my home pods and Apple TVs. I just like those are built in. I don't, I don't have to have an extra hub plugged into things.

Well, we've got Govee next. Govee has some pretty fun things. I'm going to save my favorite for last. So first there's outdoor garden lights. I think I talked about these on the show already. Um, but now they're like official. So 16 million color support, the RGB, WWIC, like the independent control for different zones. So, um, they were like split into different like light sections that you can individually control full spectrum, white light, um,

All these different things. There's 64 preset scenes and goes with the Govee app. It has matter compatibility. These do have to be plugged in compared to the ones we looked at last week that were the Nanoleaf ones. These ones are actually plugged in, but then they're full matter connectivity and everything. So those are cool. There's a second. Well, these are the second other ones out there. Then they have outdoor clear bulbs.

uh, like clear bulb string lights, IP 67 water resistant. Um, they are impact resistant. So if they fall down and you drop them, they're not going to shatter so many, uh, like outdoor filament style bulbs. They shatter so fast. This is the first one I've seen that was like shatter resistant. So that's cool. Um, matter support. They are, I believe these are matter support. Yeah. Um, music sync built in AI powered, all this kind of crazy stuff. So those look very cool. Um,

My favorite one though, Tebow is these outdoor, this outdoor lamp host light. So it literally is a long post with a round light on the top and it puts out 2000 lumens. Uh, there's 60 white LEDs in there as well. Six zone RGB, I see lighting control. So you can do different gradients and cool stuff like that. First ever one that they say has multi-level motion support, uh,

So there's, like, you can have this turn on when there is motion going by it. And it has IP66 water resistance rating. Now, at first, I looked at this, and I moved past it. Like, I said, like, okay, it's just a light on a stick. Keep going. But then, then it hit me. This thing can be, like, moved around. It has three different mounting options. You can screw it to your deck. You can put a...

sandbag around it, or you can use spikes for in the ground. And I'm like, I love that because you could take it out there and just put it in your yard while you're playing stake in the ground, have it on the yard while you're just having like a night out. You can put it up on your deck and use the sandbag or water bag to hold it into place. The fact that this is portable and it's a smart light that works with matter. Then I got really excited by it. And then it has a motion support built in at the same time. So you can leave it out there and it just works.

can be hanging out and then you walk by it and it can turn on. Also super, super cool. This is really neat. I'm very excited by this one. So what do you think of these three? Any of these that jump out at you?

The last one is really good. The only point is if you have ultra bright light in the garden or outside, you should take care of not having lights going up because there is light pollution. I don't know if you are sensitive to this point, but all the lights in Paris have been changed to just unlight the streets and not the...

the buildings because before when you were arriving it was just a big orange bulb the whole Paris because of all the lights everywhere and Paris is a city of light but we take care of about about the light pollution and we have birds singing in the morning because they sleep well at night

That is true. Yes. So this is just a downward facing light. So there is, it's like a round disc on the top and everything is focused downward. So yeah, no light pollution going on strictly downward facing. Very good product.

Yeah, this just looks super cool to me. Price is a little high. Full MSRP is $429 in the U.S. They're launching right now at $360, but it still looks really neat. So I'm still very eager to play around with this one. Easily something we're adding to our outdoor space. So many outdoor products launching right now for the summer in the smart home. We got new wireless routers for the outside. We got cameras. We got lights, motion sensors, everything.

all this fun stuff. So it's pretty great. We have a car next, but I'm going to take a quick break. Let's thank our sponsors for the episode. So first up is Shopify. And I was actually out over the weekend with my aunt and we were looking at things at the mall and I look over her shoulder. What is she doing? She's literally on the shop app. I'm like, I love it. I love seeing Shopify in real life of people using Shopify and the shop app. And it, I,

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Then we have fast growing trees. And man, I have been really focused on the garden the last couple of weeks because we're getting into that nice weather, right? Time to plant things. And all of my fruit trees, they are looking so happy right now. I have cherries on my cherry trees that I'm going to be able to pick, you know, later this summer. They're already like the size of like acorns. Like they're getting there. Like a smaller acorn, not a big one without the hat. You guys know what cherries look like. I've also got apples going too. They're also doing really well.

Especially on my five-in-one apple tree. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I have five raised apples on one tree that I got through Fast Growing Trees. And the most recent addition is some new blueberries. We have three very big, very lush pink lemonade blueberries.

blueberry bushes that I planted right next to all of the raspberries that I have. And they are just taking off. They are already covered in berries and apparently pink lemonade ones, which I had not heard about, but it's like one of their top selling varieties. Cause they have a million of them. It produces like all through the summer. So I'm like, I'm getting berries now and I'm going to continue getting berries until like October or something here in Ohio. I'm,

So excited for that. And Harrison is just eating all the raspberries. He can get his tiny little mitts on. So we're going to go back, check the chickens. He's going to steal some raspberries, steal some blueberries, not help at all with the actual chores. Just eat all the fruit and head back into the house. So it's fun. I love it.

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Fastgrowingtrees.com, code HOMEKIT. Now is the perfect time to plant. Use HOMEKIT to save today. Offers valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. So, Acara, two things, well, I guess the big thing that they partnered with is a company called AOK. Have you heard of them before, T-Bo? I had never heard of them. No.

Yeah, me either. I assume they're probably local to China or something like that, but they are partnering them for all sorts of matter shades. And I'm really excited to look into what they have to offer. So these are for indoor or outdoor use. And the full lineup of shades they are partnering with include awnings, curtains, external Venetian blinds, interior blinds, pergolas, rolling shutters, and

and zigzag blinds. This is going to be our first awning and pergolas that I know of that would be Apple home compatible, right? Fine.

I think that way. So right now, I don't, does Apple home even support those things specifically? That's really interesting how they may show up. Well, okay. It's an opening. It's confusing. It's just an opening. So you choose how much you want to open it from zero to a 100% and that's it. The problem in fact, is that you don't know how it's opening, if it's vertical or horizontal. So to put an icon is really difficult for an app.

And we don't have a catalog of all the products available to know if the Aquara model ZZ is vertical or horizontal. That's an issue right now. Yeah, because I know these were all specifically added as individual device types with Matter, but I think that they...

Apple hasn't added support for that type of matter yet. So my guess is, like you said, a car is going to show them as basically a regular curtain or something. Even if it's a pergola, it's going to show up as a regular curtain or shade with just how much it's open and closed. So hopefully Apple will actually support the proper device types so that we can get more icons. And then third-party apps as well, you'd be able to discern what type. Do you plan to add all these device types, or are you going to wait for Apple to...

update to the Matter first? We go through HomeKit and Matter is seen by HomeKit. It's really difficult to do some HomeKit, some Matter specific stuff in an app. So the best way is that Apple, which is a part of Matter, does its job to put the new devices into HomeKit. Accessibility through HomeKit, I would say, and then everyone could use them.

True. Well, outside of a car, we have homey launching. I said, we were talking about hubs. Here's another one. The homey pro mini has launched. So this is one 99 has ethernet Zigbee thread and matter connectivity. Um, everything is locally controlled. Uh, there's the homey pro OS that this is running on to power this thing. It has one gig of memory and eight gigs of storage. The,

The basically they're saying this delivers like fast performance with 20 apps supported. That's how many people are can support on this. And then there's also still the hub pro, which offers double the Ram, but is more expensive. So I have not played around with homie too much, but you can connect like we talked about like Zigbee and thread devices to this. And then those can be bridged into Apple home. You can also just run everything through homie.

because they also have a really nice app and all those things. But I've not played around with these too much. I mean, obviously as a developer that is specific, creating an Apple home app, have you messed around with any of these like home adjacent things like, um, home assistant, homie, any of that stuff?

Not directly, in fact. But the good point is that the more of such product we will have, the more Apple will be forced to be good in the smart home environment. Because the main point of Matter is that it's multi-master. So you can have several masters that program your home, do automations,

And so you will do your automation at the best place. So Apple must be the best place. And if you look at how it was before, when you had a HomeKit product like Eve, you couldn't use it with a Samsung phone, for instance. And now with Matter, you can use it with several devices, several environments.

which do not depend on what you need. Another thing I was thinking about a few hours ago is that just if you think about all the homes that we have, in fact, at the beginning they had no water, they had no electricity, and

We have added everything, but you see in the US you still have the same electricity that in the first days. In Europe we have changed from 120 to 220 volts, but it's made to last. And the solution we had before, they were not lasting. And matter is done to be able to last. So if you install a matter switch, it should last 20 years.

We know that bad products won't last, but some really last for a very long time. And we now have a solution for that. And this is a really good point because a lot of people are building homes or renewing homes and it costs a lot. And so they should be able to buy the good products.

And when you talk about the connectivity like ZigBee and Thread, I really think that we as Apple users, we should all go to Thread because Thread is standard by Matter.

there is an extension so if you have a device that is far away like in the garden if you put a thread device in your garage then you will have extension of the thread network up to your garden and it's really useful and good because before you had wi-fi and wi-fi doesn't go everywhere you can't add a

a Wi-Fi repeater just for one lamp or one sensor. And it's the way to go. And I think we will have those technologies for a very long time. I agree. And I mean, that's been the best part about Apple Home in general. I mean, I see people who are picking up those like cheap devices

Amazon controlled outlets, plugs, smart plugs, and they last for like a year or two. I still have my original Eve products. Like they were the first ones. One of it, they might've been the first to support, you know, Apple home when it was that home kit and everything. And I got,

I picked up everything they had from motion sensor to outdoor weather sensor. I did lose my outdoor one because we moved and I left it out on the patio. So I was pretty bummed by that. But I still have the contact sensor in the window here in the studio. I peeled it off and brought it here. Still works just fine. So it's been crazy. Some of these products that have lasted me.

easily like what, 10 years, whatever. Since HomeKit has existed, my products are still supported and still work and they're working with Matter. Now I feel like we're starting at the point where maybe it makes sense to start switching to more

matter devices because we're going to have like controllers, like the brilliant panel, which I actually want to talk about in a second, but it's really cool to see all these things. I do like the homey stuff a lot. So I'm excited for the new mini one that comes out that like lower price point.

So I want to show off the brilliant panel that I got installed. And then we're going to talk about the Mesa Mij app real quick. This is really fast because I don't have the new one in my hand, but I have my old one that I can hold up for people who don't know what the brilliant panels are.

And this one is a three switch one that I had in my living room and has three switches. It's got the camera and stuff on the top and is the screen. Now the biggest high level features for the gen two models that just launched four times the resolution on the screen. It is faster with new processor inside and they have dual band wifi. So like 2.4 and five gigahertz. So it should give you better connectivity depending on where you have on this home.

And I can tell you all of those things are true in spades. Holy smokes was the setup experience even better on these Gen 2 models. It went really fast, really smooth. The newer high resolution display looks amazing. And it makes me a little angry that the amount of photos you can upload is so limited because I want to put more photos onto this thing to display them because they look so pretty and I'm bummed that you can't do more than what's on there now.

They added the back panel, again, watching on video. This is the original version. The back panel of this is chunky. Like it is very deep. And I actually had a little bit of trouble getting into the wall because with the wires and with this, it was tight. The new one, you'll see the photo in the written review, but it's about half this almost. So I had way more space inside of the wall when installing it. So huge upgrade there. Now these come apart. So you have the actual part that goes...

It has the back. This part goes into the wall. This was resigned a little bit. These are like, you're still backup buttons. You can still control your lights. Um, there's just three little soft buttons in there. Those have been changed, but the bigger part is on the back of the panel, uh,

There's now a mute button, which I thought was really great for privacy reasons. You can literally take off the panel, turn it around, toggle a physical mute switch. So this thing is never listening to you if you don't want to worry about that. So I think those are both really meaningful updates. And the thing is really fast. So it is really fast. I've had no connectivity problems. This one, I occasionally, it would yell at me like, oh, can't find your Wi-Fi. I'm like, yes, you can.

The Wi-Fi hasn't changed. You haven't moved. Why are you arguing with me? And I don't know why. It was being picky about it, but no connectivity issues at all. Screen looks super sharp. It's very fast, especially typing. It goes really smoothly. And I like those secret upgrades of the physical mute switch and the thinner back panel.

That just makes the installation easier. So I'm pretty happy with these. These are really cool. So check out the new Brilliant panels if everyone hasn't already, if you have a spot that these make sense in your home. Okay, T-Bone, let's talk about Mesomage. Give me the high level of the app for anyone who hasn't heard about it before. What's your pitch? Because there's a lot of great apps out there for Apple Home. You know, we've talked about a bunch on the podcast. So what makes Mesomage so unique and good?

In fact, it's a way that we want to work, that it's really different. The first time you talked about us, you were saying, I don't know what they mean by Maison Magique. In fact, it's a joke because in French, we have La Maison Magique.

That's where it comes from. We invented la maison magique, which is a magic home. So, in fact, the purpose is to have a magic home. Like you go up and then things pop up and you can manage your home. But

The big point is privacy. Because if you go to your toilet, you switch on the light, and Google knows that you have switched on the light of the toilet, and you go out, and you go back, and they know at what time you have switched on, they know everything about your life. Because everything is in their cloud, and it's not a privacy cloud. They have access to it. They take it. They sell it.

You don't know what they do about it. So we want it to be very different about this point. We want to be privacy first. So we collect nothing. We don't know what people do with our app because we can't know. We don't want to know. And Apple guarantees that with HomeKit, they don't want to mess what you do about it. That's why you have a HomeKit secure video. It's guaranteed that no one has access to your video. And

To show this, we have the name "mes hommages" because it's a play on words. Because when you want to have a great polite formula for a woman, you say "avec mes hommages, madame".

So it's a play on word on the fact that we want to be polite and high quality and the fact that it's magical at the same time. So what we did is that we started by doing CO2 automation. Like you have too much CO2 in your room, then you start to think slowly and you don't realize it and you have CO2 sensors. But with Apple Home,

At a point when it's way, way too high, they say, you have a problem with CO2. But they don't let you know before. So we started by smart automation for CO2. If you have a CO2 sensor, you should try it.

Because, for instance, you don't want to wake up in the middle of the night because you have too much CO2. So you have schedules with days and so on. And this is not possible with Apple Home alone. And then we have realized that, in fact, we can't have an app with just smart thing inside because people won't know the app. So we have started to...

give access to scenes because in the Apple Home app there are not good scenes. So we worked with that. So you can say I want a home cinema setup like the blinds are closing, you have a specific color of light, a specific intensity of light. But then the problem is that when you scroll in the list you click. And what have you done? Have you unlocked the garage door? Have you opened it?

you don't know what you have done. What we have done recently is that we have added a long press. You long press and then you set up your scene. To see, to make a blink to what we do, we have put a magic wand and then you have the magic wand and at the end of the magic wand animation because you long press, then the scene goes on.

And we have, as we, people always have colors for the lights. We put the color of the light. So if you press on a button and you see that it's the wrong color, you just stop pressing and you won't have the light. You choose the right one. You see the good color. And then you will have the color that goes in your whole room. And that's,

what we do it's really long to do it's really expensive to do so we work step by step we have years to go to do everything we want we are open to feedback people should tell us what they need right now what is lacking for them and we will work on it

So that's our main point. And also, just a last thing, we want to work everywhere where it's useful. So we work on Apple TV, on iPhone, iPad, Mac. On Mac, you can manage several homes at home at once. So if you have a home for vacation, you can manage it from your Mac and managing your bedroom and the other room to put on the heater, for instance, when you go to the winter in your home, you can do this from your Mac. And

and we also do Vision Pro because it's useful. The only thing we have not done right now is the Apple Watch because the Home app on the Apple Watch is quite good, in fact, from what we think. But we use the Apple Watch, for instance, my son, when he goes to school, the heater goes off in his room because he has an Apple Watch, and going out of the home launches a Mesomage automation, and then the heater goes off.

And you know that managing ether schedules is a mess and then having this automatic management by presence by Apple devices is really easy in fact. So that's a main presentation of what we want to do.

Do you have any sort of standby mode widget at all? I'm very curious. No, not yet. Because in fact, there is a big issue is that everyone wants to have widget to see if your light is on, if your light is off.

But the way widgets are working is that they should not consume energy on your phone because you don't want to have no battery because you have a widget on your phone. So Apple gives you time for apps just a few times a day and quite often it's not synchronized with the reality except for the Apple Home app which has full system access.

So we don't want to work on things that we won't bring value. We want to add the features like we did with the CO2 automations or the economy mode when we go out of your home. And we have other settings in preparation like for window covering and so on. But we work with them for months, years to be sure that everything is all right before releasing.

What about, what other things do you want Apple to unlock? So I know some of Apple's best features, you know, they still keep just for the home app. For example, cameras. You can view cameras in third-party apps, but you can't view the recording. And while their interface is decent enough, I have to believe that a third-party developer could create a improved interface for viewing recordings better.

from, you know, HomeKit secure video cameras. That you can't view at all in third-party apps. Is there anything like that that you would like to see Apple unlock for third-party devs? Um...

We don't need this for our app. In fact, there is a big fallback, a big issue. It's connectivity. And so if you make an app to show your camera and then you are traveling and you have no network access,

You don't have the live image and then you think the app is crap. But in fact, it's just you don't have connectivity and this is a big issue. So if you look at what Apple does for viewing the cameras, the job is correct.

and I don't think we can do better than what Apple does for viewing. Perhaps I don't use other systems and I don't see what others are making, but without HomeKit Secure Video, I mean, but...

That's not the main point. The main point is really that we have remote control homes and we should go to smart homes. When you arrive, you have things that are active. For instance, why do you close the curtains? It's because you need to close the curtains. But why do you need that?

There are reasons behind and you have sensors and perhaps you shouldn't manage your curtains yourself. You see, that's the kind of things that we are working on improving. But it's long and we don't want to push things that are not ready. So that's why we don't have more stuff right now. Okay, here's a question.

Apple is rumored to be unlocking on-device AI models with iOS 26. If we're going to go with the 26 naming, that is rumored. Or iOS 19, whatever it's called. But they're going to allow apps to use their own on-device AI engines. Would you be able to use anything like that to help automate anything in the home? Would you be able to create any features around that?

We work on such features, but we can do only what Apple allows. For instance, for what you said about having a pop-up when you are at the top of your stairs, they have created what they call app intents. It's a bit technical, but they have just about 10 of them. 10...

10 kinds of use of this intent, but they don't have anything for Apple Home. So we have asked them already, but currently they have nothing, and I don't know if they would. But we definitely work on this subject. I'm trying to think, like, if you could, all on device, if you could see when people are using their accessories and use those on-device AM models to then be able to be predictive about suggesting a scene or something like that.

based on how they're using it within your app. In fact, if you remember the privacy thing, the point is not that we would do the thing, is that we would allow your iPhone to know that now it's time to do something with us. So that's what we're working on. Makes sense. Cool. We don't want to know what you do.

Which is always good. That's why everyone... Dan and I got into that all last week of these AI cloud services that get very scary when it comes to your smart home because you're going to have to know what you do. And the whole point about HomeKit and your app and many other HomeKit apps is it's all local. There's nothing going out. There's no analytics, no what you're controlling when you're home, nothing. And I think a lot of HomeKit users like that. And...

Yeah. So I'm excited for Apple to introduce local AI models that could maybe do some stuff on device without having to send it out. And I'm curious to how that will have ramifications for the home, how third party devs could be able to use anything like that. But I think it's exciting. So, um, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. Walking through all the news and your app. Uh, it's very enlightening. I'm very excited for WWDC. I hope you are too. Yes, of course. Uh,

I will be covering all of the news for everyone. Next week's episode, another super special guest. We're going to get chatty, I'm sure. So it's going to be a great episode next week. I'm also going to do the WWDC wish list episode next.

next week. Like it'll be like just ahead of dub dub. So expect that. So if anyone still has more suggestions on what you want to see with iOS 19, Apple's other platforms, whatever they're called, make sure you send them in. I've gotten a few. So leave me in the video version of this. You can see at youtube.com slash home kid insider, email them to me at Andrew at apple insider.com or put them on a Twitter, Andrew underscore OSU also on, on threads and blue sky, all the different apps to,

Timo, thank you again. Everyone can go download the Mesomage app if you would like. Like you said, it's on literally every platform. It was the first HomeKit app, I think, that I saw for Vision Pro. I think, yeah. First one to launch on Vision Pro, so that's always exciting too. There you go. So try it. Give it a shot. If you guys have feedback, you can reach out. How can they reach out to you? Twitter, is that the easiest way for them to send you feedback on the app? Yes, or in the App Store also.

Perfect. There you guys go. Awesome. Everyone do what you guys do best. Get this review 5, 10, 100 star rating on your podcast player of choice. And join me next week for another very exciting, very special episode. See everyone. Bye.