I’ve been playing with Home Remote recently in my quest to build an interface that has more polish. With the lengths folks are going to, to improve the native dashboarding capability and some of the admittedly creative, yet elaborate, solutions people come up with - there is already a time investment needed if you want an interface that doesn’t look like a DIY solution on your wall.
Home Remote gives you immense flexibility and a desktop based WYSIWYG designer that although does come with a learning curve is immensely powerful and has various OOB integrations such as Sonos. It’s local and more performant than the native dashboards even on old hardware. I’ve just repurposed a first gen iPad mini that struggles with running stock apple apps - it works fine with Home Remote!
The only thing that is now restricting what can be created for me is a lack of design skill on my part ! but the software doesn’t constrain you; I’ve yet to find something I couldn’t achieve in Home Remote. You can see my first efforts in the post below.. I intend to share the project files once I’ve got the basics working as a sort of “template” and I’m sure someone with more design UX/UI skill than me can add some polish ...
