HomeView's First Day in the Apartment

Today is only day one for HomeView, but I can already feel how much I’m going to love having this device around in my apartment. It’s been shockingly fast and responsive when I’ve barked orders at it controlling the lights or changing the music that’s playing on it. The hardware feels incredibly premium, which is of course not surprising. But for a $299 device, it is next level. It far surpasses anything Google or Amazon has ever made in the home department. I want to chuck my Nest Hubs out the window.

The HomeView operating system also feels snappy and smooth. It’s fairly limited at launch, but I think that may be for the best. We all know by now that HomeView’s third-party app story is a limited selection of CarPlay intents. The second I got my HomeView configured apps like Overcast, The New York Times, and Nintendo Music popped right up on the home screen. They all work great, albeit a little slowly. It reminds me of when the original Apple Watch launched with apps offloaded to the iPhone. They’re not nearly as bad as those were back in the day, but native HomeView apps are definitely something that we’re going to need at some point.

I have tons of ideas for ways to expand this thing’s functionality. But I think Apple’s approaching this carefully, we already know that HomeView hardware has been ready for a long time and that Siri AI was the holdup. So you’d think that they’ve had a larger app story at the get go. By limiting the app selection on day one, whether intentionally or not, they can see how people want to use HomeView and figure out what use cases make sense rather than simply opening a gate and hoping developers come through. So despite the similarity of apps loading off of your iPhone, this is not the same app story as the Apple Watch and that’s a good thing.

For now, HomeView is an adorable smart speaker with a beautiful display for quick interactions in essential apps. That’s more than enough to make it a hit this holiday and into 2027.