The screen
The things you actually touch, and nothing else.
Home Assistant knows about hundreds of entities. You reach for six of them. Pick those, name them, give them an icon, and they become tiles laid out for a thumb.
The whole tile is the button
Lights, switches, covers, gates, locks, fans, valves, sirens and humidifiers. Tap anywhere on the tile — no aiming for a small switch on the right.
Arrange it like a home screen
Hold a tile and drag. Put the front gate first, because that is the one you use in the rain.
Readings, not just switches
Temperature, humidity, power, water, air quality. A door sensor can light its tile too — and any tile can invert, for the pump that should be running.
Honest about the wait
Designed around the tap.
- The tile lights the instant you touch it, before the house has answered — so it never feels like nothing happened.
- Then it tells the truth. Talo re-reads the thing on a widening delay and settles on what the house actually reports.
- A gate that takes eight seconds looks like a gate that takes eight seconds — Opening reads as opening, not as open.
- Arming reads as arming, and holds there until the panel says otherwise.
- A refused command puts the old state back rather than leaving a tile that lied to you.
- Over 220 icons, twenty of them drawn for this app because the system has no symbol for a heat pump or an anemometer.
- Home Assistant's own icons are understood — 166
mdi:names map across, so most things arrive already dressed. - Cats and dogs included, for the pet door and the feeder.
The alarm
Only the modes your panel actually has.
Home Assistant offers six arming modes. Most houses use two or three. Tick the ones yours supports — off, night, away, whatever it is — and the rest stay out of the way. No keypad: Talo assumes a panel that arms without a code, which is how most of them are set up.
Everywhere you'd reach for it
The gate, without opening an app.
Control Center
Swipe down, tap, done. Add a Talo toggle or the alarm and reach a thing without opening anything.
The Lock Screen
The same control drops into either of the two corner slots. No unlock, no app — the gate from a dark screen.
The Action button
Assign a control to the side button and the gate is one press, whatever else the phone was doing.
Apple Watch
The same things, tapped from your wrist. It reaches the server itself, so the phone doesn't have to be nearby — and a complication puts one thing on the face.
Siri and Spotlight
"Toggle the gate in Talo." Every thing is a shortcut, so it works by voice, from search, and in any automation you build.
A Focus filter
Sleep turns on, the alarm arms. The switch you already throw every night throws the house with it.
Only near home
A gate that refuses to open from the office.
Any thing can be restricted to a circle around your house. Outside it, that thing refuses — from Control Center, your watch, the Action button, Siri and Focus alike. The only way past is opening Talo and confirming, and it asks first.
- The centre comes from your own Home Assistant, which already knows where your house is. No map, no dropped pin — just a radius.
- It fails closed. No permission, no reading, or a reading too old to trust all block the command. A restriction you could lift by switching off Location Services would not be one.
- Your position is never stored and never sent. iOS is asked to watch a circle and say when you cross it; what Talo keeps is a yes or a no.
Set up once
Your iPhone, iPad and Watch agree.
The server address and the things you picked travel through your own iCloud, so a house set up on the iPhone is already set up on the iPad and the Watch. The access token rides iCloud Keychain, the way your saved passwords do.
Setup won't finish until a connection has actually worked, and every error names the fix rather than the symptom.
Private by construction
Talo has no servers.
The only address it connects to is the Home Assistant you enter. No analytics, no tracking, no advertising, no third-party SDKs, and no account to create — the only credentials involved are the ones your Home Assistant already issued to you.
In your language
All of it translated.
Not just the buttons — the error messages, the icon names, the Siri phrases and the alarm modes.
What it costs
Free for a fortnight. Then once, and never again.
€5.99Fourteen days with every feature switched on — no trimmed version, nothing held back. After that Talo keeps showing your house and stops switching it, until you unlock it.
- One payment. Not a subscription.
- Shared with your family, if you use Family Sharing.
- Every device on your Apple Account.
- Nothing you set up is ever removed.
Before you start
What Talo needs.
- A Home Assistant of your own — Talo is a client, not a service. There is no Talo cloud to sign up for.
- Its address, typed the way you'd type it in a browser.
homeassistant.local:8123, an IP, or a public HTTPS name behind a reverse proxy. - A long-lived access token, from your Home Assistant profile under Security. It is kept in the iOS keychain.
- iOS 18 or later. That is the floor because Control Center controls need it.
Support
Questions? Ideas? Something broken?
Talo is made by one person who reads every email. Bug reports, an entity that shows the wrong icon, or a domain it should handle and doesn't:
offline@dresende.pt