My House, My Things is on the iPhone
Last time I wrote about this app I said the iPhone version would arrive when sync was solved properly, and not before.
It’s solved. The app is on the iPhone, and your house moves between your phone and your Macs on its own.
What’s changed
It’s one app on two platforms, not two apps. £19.99 or $19.99, bought once, covers the iPhone and the Mac. If you already bought it on the Mac, the iPhone app is yours at no extra cost and you don’t have to do anything. It was £34.99 for the Mac on its own before this, so it has got cheaper and gained a platform at the same time, which I appreciate is the wrong direction for a business and the right one for the person who already paid me.
On the phone it’s called My House, because that’s what fits under an icon. It needs iOS 18.
One app, not two
I had planned to sell the iPhone app separately. That’s what Things 3 does, and Things 3 is the app I hold this one up against, so copying its commercial model felt like the safe call.
I changed my mind a few days before submitting.
Two things pushed it. The first is that I think more people will want this on their phone than on their Mac, and charging twice for the thing most people will actually use is a strange way to treat them. The second is that one payment is simply a better fit for what the app is. It’s a record you keep for years. Charging per device makes it feel like a service, and the entire argument for the app is that it isn’t one.
The awkward part is the timing. Apple lets you make the iPhone version part of the same purchase, but only before the second app exists. Two separate apps can never be merged into one later, so this was decide-now-or-never rather than decide-later-when-you-have-data. Nothing concentrates the mind like a door closing.
There was a smaller, dafter reason too. App Store Connect won’t let one account use the same name for two apps, so the separate version couldn’t have been called My House, My Things. It would have had to be My House, My Things for iPhone, which is the sort of name you give something when the system has beaten you.
Sync without an account
This was the actual work, and it’s the bit I was unwilling to rush.
Your house goes to your own iCloud. Not to a server of mine, because there is no server of mine. Apple’s CloudKit puts it in your private database, which is the same place your other apps keep your things, and I have no way to read it. The App Store privacy label still says Data Not Collected, and it says that because nothing is collected, not because I found a form of words.
My favourite detail is one almost nobody will check. The Mac app still has no permission to open a network connection at all. It cannot phone anywhere, including me, because the entitlement isn’t there. When sync is on, macOS’s own iCloud service does the carrying, not the app. The privacy promise didn’t get watered down to allow sync; sync got built in a way that fits inside the promise.
Sync is on from the start for a new house, and you can switch it off in Settings. If you already had the app on your Mac before this release, it stays off until you turn it on, because quietly starting to move someone’s data about after they installed something on a different understanding isn’t on.
The phone is for standing in front of the thing
The Mac is where you sit down with the record. The phone is where you’re in front of the boiler with a torch.
So that’s what the phone is for. Photograph the rating plate rather than copying a serial number wrong. Scan a receipt flat, and several pages become one PDF. Mark the gutters done from the top of the ladder, while it’s true, instead of at the desk three days later when you’ve forgotten what it cost. Book the next service by typing it the way you’d say it, “4 Feb 27”, “every 12 months”, “a week before”, and the app reads it back to you before it saves anything.
That last one matters more than it sounds. A record is only worth keeping if you trust it, and you only trust it if you can see what it understood before it commits.
Simple, and no AI
There is no AI in this app and I have no plans to put any in.
I’m aware that’s now a feature worth stating out loud, which tells you something about where we are. It isn’t a principled stand against the technology; I use local models most days. It’s that this app’s job is to hold facts you typed and give them back to you unchanged, and there is no part of that job that is improved by something making an informed guess.
The bar remains Things 3: clean on the surface, with the detail a tap away. Easy to describe, hard to build, and the thing I’ll keep aiming at.
The Mac got things too
The same release changed a few things on the desktop.
Rooms are now places, so the garden, the car and the shed fit. It turns out that “where is this thing” is a broader question than a floor plan allows, which is obvious in hindsight and wasn’t at the time.
A job you need to do can now be marked done, done on another day, or rescheduled, rather than only the first of those. Logging a job and scheduling one are properly separate. And a place keeps a history the way a thing already did, so you can ask what has happened in the kitchen as well as what has happened to the boiler.
There’s a full list on the changelog.
Where to get it
It’s on the App Store, for the iPhone and the Mac, one purchase: apps.apple.com/app/id6812472034
More about what it does at myhousemythings.com.
I still can’t tell you when my boiler was last serviced without looking. The difference is that now I can look from the airing cupboard.