Help Guide

R.L.SAND HOME Documentation

Learn about R.L.SAND HOME's features and how to use them.

R.L.SAND HOME is an Apple HomeKit automation builder for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It gives you a clearer view of your home — rooms, devices, sensors, scenes, and existing automations — and four ways to build new automations, including a conversational AI that runs entirely on your device.

Explore the docs

• Get Started — what the app does and how to install it.
• Core Concepts — triggers, conditions, actions, and AND/OR logic.
• Creating Automations — templates, guided, AI, and the block editor.
• App Screens — a reference page for every screen in the app.
• AI Assistant — the on-device helper and the in-app help button.
• Help & Reference — FAQ, troubleshooting, and a glossary.

What makes it different

Everything the AI does runs on your device using Apple's FoundationModels framework — nothing is sent to the cloud, there are no API keys, and there is no subscription. The app uses zero third-party dependencies and supports nested AND/OR condition logic that Apple's own Home app cannot fully edit.

Note: R.L.SAND HOME is a product of RLSAND Inc. HomeKit, Apple Home, HomePod, and Apple TV are trademarks of Apple Inc.

Introduction

R.L.SAND HOME is a multiplatform app for creating and managing Apple HomeKit automations. It runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac (via Mac Catalyst) from a single codebase, and adapts its layout to each screen size.

Apple's Home app is deliberately simple, and its automation builder hides most of what HomeKit can actually do. R.L.SAND HOME exposes that power while keeping it approachable:

• Browse your homes, rooms, devices, and live sensor readings in one place.
• See every existing automation, sorted and grouped, with a plain-English summary of what each one does.
• Build new automations four different ways — from one-tap templates to a full visual block editor.
• Describe an automation in plain English and let an on-device AI turn it into a working rule.
• Use nested AND/OR condition logic that Apple's Home app cannot fully edit.

Who it's for

Anyone with an Apple Home setup who wants automations that go beyond "turn the lights on at sunset." You don't need to be a developer. If you can describe what you want to happen, the app can usually build it.

Privacy first

All AI in R.L.SAND HOME runs locally using Apple's FoundationModels framework (iOS 26 and later). Nothing about your home is sent to a server, there are no accounts or API keys, and the AI features carry no per-use cost.

Next steps

• What you can do — a tour of the major features.
• Installation — requirements and how to get the app.
• First launch — choosing a home and the free Sample Home.

Feature Overview

See your whole home

A dashboard of pinned tiles, plus a full "My Home" grid covering rooms, zones, devices, sensors, cameras, speakers and TVs, scenes, batteries, health, automations, and templates. Counts on every tile reflect your live HomeKit inventory.

Four ways to build an automation

• Templates — ready-made automations generated from the devices you actually own. Pick a room, pick a template, save. No typing.
• Guided — a step-by-step questionnaire that walks you through trigger, room, device, action, and conditions.
• AI Wizard — describe the automation in plain English; an on-device LLM parses it and asks clarifying questions when something is ambiguous (iOS 26+).
• Block Editor — an expert, drag-and-drop editor with TRIGGER / IF / THEN sections and nested condition groups.

See Creating Automations for details on each.

Powerful condition logic

Combine conditions with AND, OR, and nested groups — for example, "motion AND (after 9 PM) AND (front door OR patio door open)." The block editor renders nested groups visually and the AI Wizard accepts them from natural language.

Live device control

Detail pages let you toggle lights, adjust brightness, and read current values directly, on both compact iPhone sheets and the wider iPad/Mac layout.

Health and maintenance

A Health analyzer scans your saved automations for duplicate names, conflicting triggers, low-battery devices, and unreliable time-based triggers — and can repair the time-trigger issues for you.

Voice and the AI Assistant

A built-in assistant answers questions about the app and HomeKit and can navigate you to the right screen. You can speak to it and have replies read aloud, all on-device. See AI Assistant.

Search everywhere

Every list page — devices, rooms, sensors, automations — is searchable.

Installation

R.L.SAND HOME is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The same app record covers all platforms.

Requirements

The manual wizard, templates, and block editor work on iOS 17–25. The conversational AI Wizard requires iOS 26+ because it depends on Apple's FoundationModels framework. On older systems the app falls back to the guided wizard automatically.

Permissions

On first launch the app asks for HomeKit access. This is required to read your rooms, devices, and sensors and to save automations. The app talks only to HomeKit on your device — it makes no network calls for its core features.

If you decline HomeKit access, you can still explore everything using the free Sample Home.

Do I need any hardware to try it?

No. The built-in Sample Home is fully populated with rooms, devices, sensors, scenes, and example automations, so you can explore every feature without owning any HomeKit accessories. See First launch.

First Launch & Choosing a Home

When you open R.L.SAND HOME, a single picker — "Choose your home" — lists your real HomeKit homes plus an option to Use the Demo Home — Always Free.

The Sample Home is always free

The built-in Sample Home (also called the Demo Home) lets you explore every feature with no purchase and no HomeKit accessories. It contains four rooms, ten devices, ten sensors, two zones, scenes, cameras, and six example automations covering simple, auto-reverse, AND, OR, nested, and climate rules.

Use it to try the AI Wizard, templates, the block editor, and device control before committing.

Unlocking your real home

To work with your own HomeKit home, R.L.SAND HOME uses a single one-time purchase, Full Unlock, for $14.99. There is no subscription.

• The Sample Home stays free forever.
• Full Unlock enables your own real HomeKit home across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
• Switching from the Sample Home to a real home prompts the purchase if you haven't unlocked yet.

You can restore a previous purchase from the paywall's Restore option.

Switching homes later

You can return to the home picker at any time and switch between your real home(s) and the Sample Home. Switching back to a real home re-checks your Full Unlock entitlement.

Pricing & Full Unlock

R.L.SAND HOME uses a simple model: free to explore, one purchase to unlock your home.

What's free

The Sample Home is always free. It is fully populated, so every feature — the AI Wizard, guided wizard, templates, block editor, device control, health, and the assistant — is available to try with no purchase.

Full Unlock — $14.99, one time

A single non-consumable in-app purchase, Full Unlock, enables your own real HomeKit home. There is no subscription and no recurring charge.

• One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, and Mac (it's a single app record across platforms).
• Buy it from the paywall, which appears when you switch to a real home without having unlocked.
• Already purchased on another device? Use Restore on the paywall.

Why one-time and not a subscription

The AI runs entirely on your device, so there's no server cost to recover over time. A one-time unlock matches that: you pay once, and the app keeps working.

Redeeming a code

If you have an offer or promo code, you can redeem it through the App Store. Redeemed codes unlock the app the same way a purchase does.

How HomeKit Automations Work

Every HomeKit automation has three parts:

1. A trigger — the when. Something that starts the automation, such as motion being detected, a door opening, or the sun setting.
2. Conditions — the only if. Zero or more filters that must be true for the actions to run, such as "only after 9 PM" or "only if no one is home."
3. Actions — the then. One or more things that happen, such as turning on lights, setting a thermostat, or running a scene.

Read together, an automation says: when (trigger), only if (conditions), then (actions).

You need a home hub

HomeKit needs a home hub — a HomePod, Apple TV, or a resident iPad — to run automations when your iPhone is away from home. Without a hub, time- and sensor-based automations may not fire reliably. The Health page flags hub problems.

Where automations actually live

Automations you save with R.L.SAND HOME are written into HomeKit itself, so they also appear in Apple's Home app and run independently of R.L.SAND HOME. The app is a builder and a clearer viewer — it is not a separate automation engine.

On-device AI

When you use the AI Wizard, the language model runs on your device using Apple's FoundationModels framework (iOS 26+). Nothing about your home leaves the device, and no subscription is required. See On-Device AI.

Learn more

• Triggers, Conditions & Actions
• AND / OR & Nested Logic
• What HomeKit Can't Do

Triggers, Conditions & Actions

An automation is built from one trigger, any number of conditions, and one or more actions.

Triggers — what starts an automation

• Sensor state changes — motion detected, a contact sensor opening/closing, a leak detected, a lock locking/unlocking, a light turning on/off, a garage door, or an outlet.
• Threshold crossings — temperature, humidity, or light level rising above or falling below a value you choose (for example, light level below 50 lux = "it's dark").
• Time — a clock time, sunrise, or sunset, with an optional offset (for example, 30 minutes before sunset).
• Presence — someone arrives, or the last person leaves.
• Doorbell or camera events.

In Apple Home, an automation has one trigger type. To respond to several different events, create several automations.

Conditions — filters after the trigger fires

Conditions narrow when the actions actually run:

• Time of day and day of week.
• Presence (someone home / no one home).
• The state of another accessory.
• Environment thresholds (temperature, humidity, light level).

Conditions can be combined with AND, OR, and nested groups — see AND / OR & Nested Logic.

Actions — what happens

• Turn devices on/off, set brightness, color, or color temperature.
• Lock/unlock a door.
• Set a thermostat target.
• Open/close a window covering.
• Mute a speaker or set its volume (HomePod/Apple TV automation control is limited to mute and volume).
• Run a scene.
• Hand off to a Shortcut where supported.

AND / OR & Nested Logic

R.L.SAND HOME fully supports combining conditions with boolean logic.

• AND — every listed condition must be true. Example: motion is detected and it's after sunset.
• OR — any one listed condition is enough. Example: the front door or the patio door opens.
• Nested groups — mix them by grouping conditions together. Example: motion and (after 9 PM) and (front door or patio door open).

Where to build complex logic

• The Block Editor renders nested groups visually, so you can see and edit the structure.
• The AI Wizard accepts nested logic from natural language — for example, "when there's motion and it's dark or after sunset."

Apple Home caveat

Apple's own Home app only shows flat all-of / any-of condition lists. If you open an automation with nested logic in Apple Home, it may flatten the structure or display it read-only. Edit complex, nested rules in R.L.SAND HOME, not in Apple Home, to avoid losing the structure.

What HomeKit Can't Do (and Workarounds)

A single HomeKit automation cannot, by design:

• Loop or repeat an action N times.
• Insert arbitrary mid-automation delays between conditions.
• Query historical state (for example, "if motion happened three times today").
• Keep counters or aggregates (for example, "if the door opened five times").
• Branch into multiple if/else paths.

These are limits of HomeKit itself, not of R.L.SAND HOME.

Workarounds

• Chain automations — have one automation's action change a state that triggers another.
• Use scenes as reusable bundles of actions, then run a scene from several automations.
• Hand off to Shortcuts for logic HomeKit can't express on its own, where the integration supports it.

If you ask the AI Wizard for something HomeKit can't do, it will tell you rather than build a rule that won't work.

On-Device AI

The AI features in R.L.SAND HOME run entirely on your device using Apple's FoundationModels framework (iOS 26 and later). There are no network calls, no API keys, no accounts, and no per-use cost.

What the model is

Apple's on-device system language model is a roughly 3-billion-parameter model designed for privacy and low latency. It has a fixed context window of about 4,096 tokens per session.

How the app keeps it accurate

Because small on-device models can hallucinate, R.L.SAND HOME constrains the model heavily:

• Keyword-first, LLM-second — deterministic parsing detects triggers, conditions, device types, and rooms; the model confirms but never overrides those results.
• Structured output — every model call returns a typed structure, not free-form prose.
• Fresh sessions — each call starts clean to avoid context pollution.
• Explicit "I don't know" — the model is told to return "none" or "unknown" when evidence is missing, and the app then asks you.

This is also why the wizard follows a strict never-guess rule: when a room, sensor, or trigger is ambiguous, it asks you instead of guessing. See AI Wizard.

Overview — Four Ways to Build

R.L.SAND HOME offers four tools for creating an automation. They all produce the same kind of HomeKit automation — pick the one that fits how you like to work. You reach them by tapping + on the Automations screen, which opens the Create wizard's mode picker.

The recommended path

If you're not sure, start with Templates — they're built from the devices you already own, so they always produce something that works. Move to the AI Wizard when you want something a template doesn't cover, and the Block Editor when you need precise, nested logic.

Review before saving

The Guided and AI flows end at a Review step that shows exactly what will be saved and lets you jump back to fix any part before it's written to HomeKit. Templates and the Block Editor let you confirm in place.

Templates Mode

Templates are ready-made automations generated from your actual rooms and devices — so every suggestion you see is something your home can really do.

How it works

1. Pick a location — All rooms, or a specific room.
2. Pick a template from the suggestions for that location.
3. Review the automation the app built and tap Save to push it to HomeKit.

No typing and no questions.

Why a list might be empty

If no template appears, it means no room has the device-and-sensor combination that any template needs (for example, a template that turns on lights when motion is detected needs both a motion sensor and a light in the same room). Try a different location, or switch to the AI Wizard or Guided mode.

Templates mode is available on iPad and Mac. You can also browse templates directly from the Templates screen.

Guided Mode

Guided mode walks you through an automation one decision at a time. It's the best choice if you're new to HomeKit automations or want to be sure you don't miss a step.

The steps

1. Trigger — what should set the automation off (motion, a door, a time, presence, and so on).
2. Room — where it applies.
3. Device — what to act on.
4. Action — what should happen (turn on, turn off, set brightness, run a scene, etc.).
5. Conditions — optional filters (time of day, presence, thresholds).
6. Review — confirm everything, then save.

Smart shortcuts

• If a room-and-type filter matches exactly one device or sensor, the wizard adds it automatically instead of asking a redundant question.
• The picker filters to the relevant sensor type while you're choosing a trigger or condition.

Guided mode is the fallback on iOS 17–25, where the conversational AI Wizard isn't available. It ends at the shared Review step.

AI Wizard Mode

The AI Wizard lets you describe an automation in plain English — by typing or by voice — and turns it into a working HomeKit rule. It runs on Apple's on-device model and requires iOS 26 or later. See On-Device AI.

What it understands

• Rooms — "kitchen," "downstairs hallway."
• Zones — "downstairs lights" expands to every room in the zone that has the target device.
• Trigger phrases — "someone walks in" = occupancy, "the door opens" = contact, "when it's dark" = a light-level threshold, "at sunset" = sunset, "above 78 degrees" = a temperature threshold.
• Compound clauses — "and," "or," and "but."
• Durations and auto-reverse — "turn on for 5 minutes."

Example: "Turn on the kitchen lights when there's motion and it's dark."

How it works behind the scenes

The wizard identifies the room, looks up the real sensors and devices in that room, analyzes your request (asking a question if needed), generates a structured automation using your actual device names, and shows you a plain-English preview before anything is saved.

It uses your dark threshold from Settings (default 50 lux) to decide what "dark" means, and prefers a light-sensor condition over "after sunset" when a light sensor exists.

The never-guess rule

When a room, sensor, or trigger is ambiguous, the wizard asks you instead of guessing — for example, if "hallway" matches two floors, or a requested sensor isn't in the room. When it asks a question, answer the question rather than retyping your original sentence. This rule is why the AI never silently builds the wrong thing.

The AI Wizard ends at the shared Review step, and its output is always editable before saving — it is never executed automatically.

Block Editor Mode

The Block Editor is the expert tool. It shows an automation as three sections and lets you build it by hand with full control.

The three sections

• TRIGGER — the single event that starts the automation.
• IF / WHEN — the condition tree, including nested AND/OR groups.
• THEN — the actions that run.

You add items by dragging from a palette into the matching section. Each section highlights when it can accept what you're dragging, and rejects items that don't belong there.

Nested condition groups

The IF/WHEN section is where the Block Editor shines: you can build nested boolean logic such as motion AND (after 9 PM) AND (front door OR patio door open) and see the structure visually. See AND / OR & Nested Logic.

Inspector

Selecting a block opens an inspector — a trailing sidebar on iPad/Mac, or a sheet on iPhone — where you set the details: brightness, color, color temperature, thresholds, target values, and so on.

When to use it

Reach for the Block Editor when you need precise control or complex nested logic that the other modes don't expose. For everyday automations, Templates or the AI Wizard are faster.

Review & Save

The Guided and AI Wizard flows finish at a Review step before anything is saved. (Templates and the Block Editor let you confirm in place instead.)

What you see

Review summarizes the automation in clearly labeled sections — TRIGGER, CONDITIONS, and ACTION — so you can read back exactly what will run before committing.

Fixing something

Each card has an Edit affordance that jumps you back to the step that created it, so you can change the trigger, a condition, or an action without starting over.

Saving

Tapping Save to HomeKit writes the automation into HomeKit. From that moment it also appears in Apple's Home app and runs on your home hub. If HomeKit rejects part of the rule, the app reports the specific problem instead of failing silently.

Nothing runs until you save

The AI Wizard never executes an automation on its own. Its output is always shown as an editable preview first — you are the one who decides to save it.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is a grid of pinned tiles for your home — a quick, glanceable summary you choose.

• Each tile shows a live count from your HomeKit inventory (devices, sensors, scenes, automations, and so on).
• You decide which tiles appear here: every tile on the My Home grid has a Show on Dashboard toggle, and you can also manage which tiles appear from Settings.
• The Batteries tile is green when every battery is healthy and turns red only when at least one device is low or critical.

The Dashboard also offers quick actions to create an automation. To build one, you'll be taken into the Create wizard.

My Home

My Home is the complete destination grid for the home you've selected. From here you can reach every part of the app:

Rooms, Zones, Devices, Sensors, Cameras, Speakers & TVs, Scenes, Batteries, Health, Automations, and Templates.

Each tile shows a live count and carries a Show on Dashboard toggle, so you can pin the ones you use most to the Dashboard.

Rooms

The Rooms screen lists every HomeKit room in your home, with a count of the devices in each, and a search field to filter by name.

Rooms themselves are created and renamed in Apple's Home app — R.L.SAND HOME reads your existing room structure rather than managing it. If a room is missing or misnamed, fix it in Apple Home and sync.

Rooms matter for automations: when you describe an automation by room ("the kitchen lights"), the app resolves it against this list. Grouping rooms into Zones lets you target several rooms at once.

Zones

Zones are groupings of rooms — for example, "Downstairs" or "Upstairs." They let you act on several rooms at once.

In the AI Wizard, naming a zone like "downstairs lights" expands to every room in that zone that actually has the target device, so a single sentence can cover the whole floor.

Like rooms, zones come from your HomeKit setup. Manage zone membership in Apple's Home app.

Devices

The Devices screen lists your controllable accessories — lights, locks, thermostats, outlets, window coverings, and more — with each one's current state and an on/off toggle.

• View modes — switch between Grid, List, and a Finder-style Columns browser (Columns is the default on iPad/Mac).
• Search — filter by device name or room name.
• Detail pages — tap a device to see all of its services and characteristics, and to control it directly: toggle power, adjust brightness, set color or color temperature, and read live values.

Icons reflect state: a filled icon and category color mean on/active; a dimmed icon means off. A green dot means reachable; red means unreachable.

Devices are the things automations act on. Sensors — which automations react to — live on the Sensors screen.

Sensors

The Sensors screen shows live readings from your sensors: motion, contact, leak, temperature, humidity, light level, and occupancy.

• Search by sensor name, room, or sensor type.
• Readings are cached so they survive app restarts, then refreshed on the next HomeKit poll. You can also tap to refresh.

Sensors are what automations react to — they supply triggers ("when motion is detected") and conditions ("only when light level is below 50 lux"). Which devices automations act on are listed under Devices. See Triggers, Conditions & Actions.

Cameras

The Cameras screen shows your HomeKit cameras as live or cached snapshots. Tap a camera to open its stream.

Camera and doorbell events can also act as automation triggers — see Triggers, Conditions & Actions.

Speakers & TVs

This screen lists your HomePods and Apple TVs.

For automations, control of these devices is limited to mute and volume — those are the actions HomeKit exposes for speakers and TVs. You can include them as actions in an automation alongside lights, locks, and scenes. See Triggers, Conditions & Actions.

Scenes

Scenes are saved sets of device states — for example, "Good Night" or "Movie Time." On this screen you can tap a scene to run it immediately.

Scenes are also useful as automation actions: instead of listing every device change in an automation, you can have the automation run a scene. Because a scene is reusable, it's a good way to share one bundle of actions across several automations — see What HomeKit Can't Do for why this is a recommended workaround.

Automations

This is the list of every automation you've saved, each with a plain-English summary of what it does. You can sort and group the list and search it by name.

Creating a new automation

Tap + to open the Create wizard, then choose a mode: Templates, Guided, AI Wizard, or Block Editor. See the Creating Automations overview.

Editing and viewing

Tap an automation to view or edit it. Automations you save here are written into HomeKit, so they also appear in Apple's Home app and run on your home hub.

Keeping them healthy

The Health screen scans this list for duplicate names, conflicting triggers, and unreliable time-based triggers, and can repair some issues automatically.

Templates

The Templates screen lets you browse ready-made automation suggestions generated from your own rooms and devices. Pick a location (all rooms or a specific room), pick a template, review the automation the app built, and save it to HomeKit.

If the list is empty, no room has the device-and-sensor combination a template needs — pick a different location or use another create mode.

This is the same engine behind Templates mode in the Create wizard.

Batteries

The Batteries screen shows the battery level of every accessory that reports one.

The Batteries tile (on the Dashboard and My Home) is green when every battery is healthy and turns red only when at least one device is low or critical.

Low batteries matter for automations: a sensor with a dead battery can't trigger a rule. The Health screen flags low-battery devices that an automation depends on.

Health

The Health screen scans your saved automations and home for problems that quietly break automations or erode trust:

• Duplicate names across automations, devices, rooms, and scenes.
• Conflicting triggers — two rules driving the same device at the same time.
• Low-battery devices that an automation depends on.
• Home hub / network health warnings.
• Unreliable time triggers — sunrise, sunset, or calendar automations saved without explicit weekday recurrences, which iOS may run unreliably.

Each finding shows a suggested fix. For unreliable time triggers, the app can repair them for you: it rebuilds the automation with explicit weekday recurrences and reports any per-rule failures rather than hiding them. A one-time notification can alert you when a new repairable issue appears.

The Health tile on the Dashboard and My Home shows the number of outstanding findings.

Settings

Settings is organized into sections:

• AI Assistant — a master toggle. Turning it off hides the chat panel and silences spoken replies.
• AI Character & Voice — pick a persona (Leeann, Cathy, Hex, Tomas, Andrew, Tim, or a custom one) and its eye color, which is stored per persona. Voice tuning lives here too. See Voice & Personas.
• iCloud sync.
• Appearance — dark or light mode and background.
• Device-type priorities.
• Dashboard tiles — choose which tiles appear on the Dashboard.
• About.

One setting worth knowing for automations: the dark threshold (lux value) the AI Wizard uses to decide what "dark" means — the default is 50 lux.

AI Assistant Overview

R.L.SAND HOME includes a built-in assistant, reachable from the sidebar footer (or the chat panel on iPhone). It exists for exactly two purposes:

1. Help — answer questions about the app and about HomeKit automations.
2. Routing — take you to the screen that answers your question or holds the action you want.

It runs on Apple's on-device model — your questions never leave your device. See On-Device AI.

What it will and won't do

• It will explain features, answer HomeKit questions, and offer a button to jump to the right screen.
• It knows where you are — replies are grounded in the screen you're currently on.
• It won't build automation logic itself. When you describe an automation you want, it hands you to the Create wizard with your own words carried over — the wizard's tested pipeline does the interpreting.

This keeps the assistant fast and reliable: it points you at the right tool rather than guessing at a rule.

Off-topic and safety

The assistant happily handles light, harmless small talk but will gently steer back to the app, and it declines anything unsafe or inappropriate. It's trained on the app, so app and HomeKit questions get the best answers.

Turning it off

You can disable the assistant entirely from Settings — AI Assistant, which also silences spoken replies.

Voice & Personas

The assistant supports both speech input and spoken replies, all processed on-device.

Talk and listen

• Tap the mic to speak a question or an automation request instead of typing.
• Replies can be read aloud. Because replies are spoken, the assistant keeps them short and avoids symbols that read out badly.

Personas

In Settings — AI Character & Voice, choose a persona — Leeann, Cathy, Hex, Tomas, Andrew, Tim, or a custom one — and set its eye color (stored per persona). Voice tuning lives in the same section.

A note on pronunciation

The app spells the brand out audibly as "are-ell-sand" so spoken replies say the name clearly rather than mashing it into one word.

The In-App Help (?) Button

Every screen in R.L.SAND HOME has a ? button. Tapping it opens the documentation page for the screen you're on, and the assistant draws on that same content to answer your questions in context.

How the mapping works

These docs are the single source for both the website and in-app help. Each App Screen page carries an appPage value that matches the app's internal screen identifier. When you tap ?, the app looks up the current screen's identifier and opens the page whose appPage matches.

If the current screen has no specific match, the help button opens the documentation home.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is R.L.SAND HOME free?

You can explore everything for free using the built-in Sample Home. To use your own real HomeKit home, there's a single one-time purchase, Full Unlock ($14.99). There is no subscription. See Pricing & Full Unlock.

Does the AI send my data anywhere?

No. All AI runs on your device using Apple's FoundationModels framework. There are no network calls, accounts, or API keys for the AI features. See On-Device AI.

Do I need any HomeKit devices to try it?

No. The Sample Home is fully populated with rooms, devices, sensors, scenes, and example automations.

Why do I need iOS 26 for the AI Wizard?

The conversational AI Wizard depends on Apple's on-device model, which is available on iOS / iPadOS / macOS 26 and later. On earlier systems, the Guided wizard, templates, and block editor still work.

Do automations I create here show up in Apple's Home app?

Yes. Automations are written into HomeKit, so they appear in Apple Home and run on your home hub independently of R.L.SAND HOME.

Why does the wizard keep asking me questions instead of just building it?

By design. When a room, sensor, or trigger is ambiguous, the app asks rather than guesses, so it never silently builds the wrong automation. Answer its question to continue. See AI Wizard.

Can I build AND/OR logic?

Yes — including nested groups. Build complex logic in R.L.SAND HOME rather than Apple Home, which can only display flat condition lists. See AND / OR & Nested Logic.

Why can't I rename a room in the app?

Rooms and zones come from your HomeKit setup; create and rename them in Apple's Home app, then sync. See Rooms.

Can I control my HomePod or Apple TV with an automation?

For speakers and TVs, automation control is limited to mute and volume — that's what HomeKit exposes. See Speakers & TVs.

Troubleshooting

My automation doesn't run when I'm away from home

You likely need a home hub — a HomePod, Apple TV, or resident iPad — to run automations while your iPhone is away. Check the Health screen for hub warnings.

A time-based automation (sunrise/sunset) fires unreliably

Time triggers saved without explicit weekday recurrences can be unreliable on iOS. Open Health; it detects these and can repair them by rebuilding the automation with explicit recurrences.

A sensor isn't triggering my automation

Check the sensor's battery on the Batteries screen — a dead battery means the sensor can't report. Also confirm the sensor shows a recent reading on the Sensors screen.

The templates list is empty

A template needs a specific device-and-sensor combination in the same room (for example, a motion sensor and a light). If no room qualifies, the list is empty. Try a different location or use the AI Wizard. See Templates.

My nested AND/OR logic looks wrong in Apple's Home app

Apple Home only displays flat condition lists and may flatten or read-only-display nested rules. Edit complex logic in R.L.SAND HOME. See AND / OR & Nested Logic.

The AI Wizard isn't available

It requires iOS / iPadOS / macOS 26 or later. On earlier systems, use the Guided wizard instead.

A device shows a red dot or won't respond

A red dot means the accessory is unreachable. Check that it's powered and on your network; the issue is usually with the accessory or hub rather than the app.

My changes aren't showing up

Use Sync HomeKit to refresh the app's view of your home after making changes in Apple Home or adding accessories.

Glossary

Action — Something an automation does, such as turning on a light or running a scene. See Triggers, Conditions & Actions.

Automation — A saved rule made of a trigger, optional conditions, and one or more actions.

Block Editor — The expert, drag-and-drop create mode with TRIGGER / IF / THEN sections. See Block Editor.

Condition — A filter that must be true for an automation's actions to run.

Full Unlock — The one-time $14.99 purchase that enables your real HomeKit home. See Pricing & Full Unlock.

Home hub — A HomePod, Apple TV, or resident iPad that runs automations when you're away.

Nested group — Conditions grouped together to express logic like A AND (B OR C).

On-device model — Apple's local language model (FoundationModels, iOS 26+) that powers the AI features without any cloud. See On-Device AI.

Persona — The assistant's selectable character and voice. See Voice & Personas.

Sample Home (Demo Home) — The free, fully populated home you can explore without a purchase or any accessories.

Scene — A saved set of device states you can run directly or use as an automation action.

Sensor — A device that reports a reading (motion, contact, leak, temperature, humidity, light, occupancy) and supplies triggers and conditions.

Template — A ready-made automation generated from the devices you already own. See Templates.

Trigger — The event that starts an automation.

Zone — A grouping of rooms, such as "Downstairs."