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HomeSnap

A Private, Read-Only Window Into Your HomeKit Home

Open Minis Is the iOS Agent I Wish Siri AI Could Be

Open Minis for iOS.

Open Minis for iOS.

Every once in a while, I come across a third-party app that either resets my expectations for a particular niche of software on iOS or creates an entirely new category altogether. I’ve had quite a few of these moments in the 17 years I’ve been writing app reviews at MacStories: Editorial, Workflow, Obsidian, Sky, and, most recently, OpenClaw come to mind. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had another such moment with Open Minis, a new chatbot app for iPhone and iPad that I can best describe as getting a preview of Siri AI’s agentic future, today.

Open Minis is an on-device agent that lets you use any frontier model for conversations, with a twist: unlike other AI wrappers, this app deeply integrates with all sorts of native Apple system frameworks using official APIs available to third-party developers. Open Minis can control Reminders and Music, which we have seen before, but also Calendar, Maps, HomeKit, HealthKit, and Files; it can even work with frameworks such as Vision for OCR, Apple NLP for natural language processing, the iOS clipboard, speech recognition and dictation, NFC, and Bluetooth. Furthermore, Open Minis comes with its own configurable workspace in the Files app, has an on-device memory system, and features browser-use capabilities via a (once again, native for iOS developers) built-in WebKit web view.

Effectively, Open Minis is what would happen if you rolled Claude Code and OpenClaw into one intuitive agentic experience designed for Apple users, with a powerful tool-calling harness that can improve and tweak itself, and with integrations specifically designed for the Apple ecosystem. It is the most impressive indie app I’ve seen in a while. If you were disappointed by the lack of power-user capabilities in Siri AI, this is a real, currently shipping example of what Siri AI could be if only it were powered by a frontier model with truly agentic functionalities.

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HomeSnap: A Private, Read-Only Window Into Your HomeKit Home [Sponsor]

HomeSnap remembers everything your HomeKit home does, shows you its live status, and tells you the moment something needs attention, right from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. No accounts, no third-party servers, and your data stays private to you.

Your Home, Remembered

Apple’s Home app shows you this instant. HomeSnap shows you the whole story. It quietly captures a snapshot of your entire setup about once a day and tells you exactly what changed, room by room and device by device. A Timeline and a live Event Log let you scroll back through motion, lights, locks, and doors as they happened, so “did the garage really open at 2 a.m.?” finally has an answer.

Your Home Has an API

This is the part power users tend to love. Flip one switch in Settings and HomeSnap serves your home over your own Wi-Fi, off by default, LAN-only, no cloud and no account involved:

  • A local web dashboard you can open from any laptop, phone, or tablet on your network: live status tiles, an activity heatmap, charts, and per-room and per-device pages.
  • A read-only JSON HTTP API with real endpoints for your home, rooms, accessories, scenes, automations, events, change history, health, and battery and temperature trends. Point a script, a shortcut, or a Home Assistant REST sensor at it and pull structured data out of HomeKit without touching a single Apple framework.
  • An MCP server (Model Context Protocol), so you can connect the AI assistant you already use, like Claude, and ask about your home in plain language: “which batteries will die first?”, “what happened in the garage last night?”, “which lights were on longest this week?” The assistant reads your home, read-only, over your own network.
  • Markdown and JSON exports of your home and its history, plus live updates over WebSocket for anything you want to build on top.

Everything here is read-only and stays on your network. Nothing about your home is sent to a third party, and you can put a password on it.

Live Status and Smarter Batteries

The My Home tab is your home exactly as it is right now: which lights are on, which doors are open, what every sensor reads. Battery-powered devices are ranked most-urgent-first, and HomeSnap estimates how long each one will last (“about 3 weeks”) from its own history, so a dying sensor never catches you off guard.

Alerts You Actually Want

Build your own notification rules: pick an accessory, pick a trigger (a light turns on, a garage door opens, a fan passes a speed you set), and get told when it happens. Add freeze and overheat temperature alerts, low-battery warnings, and quiet hours so nothing pings you overnight.

Insights Into How Your Home Lives

A native Insights screen shows an activity heatmap of your busiest hours, your most active devices and rooms, each light’s total on-time, and recent door and lock activity. The same numbers power a private web dashboard you can open from any device on your Wi-Fi.

A Vault for Your Setup Codes

HomeSnap saves your HomeKit and Matter pairing codes so you can re-pair a device after a reset. Scan a code or type it in, and it comes back later as a scannable QR or a large, readable number, safely stored in iCloud.

Our thanks to HomeSnap for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Podcast Rewind: Fable, SteamOS on Android, and Voice-Created Shortcuts

Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:

AppStories

This week, Federico and John look at their experiences with Claude Fable 5 and how it differs from other models and break down the controversial changes made by OpenAI to its ChatGPT Mac app.

Then on AppStories+, John and Federico contrast their experiences with Fable 5 and OpenAI’s new family of GPT 5.6 models.

NPC: Next Portable Console

This week, Brendon and John go it alone with more bizarre news from AYANEO, a new tease and OS update from Anbernic, Valve’s e-ink Steam Machine faceplate, Armada bringing SteamOS to Android handhelds, and more.

On NPC XL, John and Brendon check on handheld gaming halfway through the year and look forward to what the rest of 2026 may have in store for the hobby.

Comfort Zone

Matt has been doing tons with Quick Reads, Chris has all the small things, and everyone creates Shortcuts WITH THEIR VOICE.

This week’s Cozy Zone sees the boys competing in Niléane’s Great Star Wars Quotes Quiz, and it goes… let’s just say “good and bad.”

MacStories Unwind

On a special Saturday edition of MacStories Unwind, Federico and John talk live music, blockbuster movies, and their ongoing experiments with Markdown text editors.

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visionOS 27: The MacStories Beta Preview

Summer beta season is in full swing, with a new wave of testers coming aboard via the just-released public OS 27 betas. While visionOS hasn’t ever been included in the public beta program, now is as good a time as any to check in on visionOS 27. What’s it like living with the features Apple highlighted at WWDC, and if you’re jumping on the public betas with your other devices, is it a good time to give the visionOS 27 developer beta a try, too? Let’s dig in and find out.

Siri AI

Given the massive overhaul Siri is receiving this year and the fact that the Vision Pro has always been a little behind when it comes to Apple Intelligence features, I didn’t expect visionOS to get the full Siri AI treatment this year. Thankfully, I was wrong. Not only is Siri AI fully present in visionOS 27, but the experience of interacting with the assistant has even been adapted to fit a spatial context.

For starters, Siri is much more capable in visionOS 27 than ever before. It’s not just for opening apps anymore. With access to your personal context, Siri can handle tasks I would have never imagined prompting it for until now. Questions like, “When was the last time I ate at this restaurant?” or, “How many years in a row have I attended this local event?” used to lead me down time-intensive rabbit holes of scavenging emails, texts, calendar events, photos, and more. Now, Siri can pull all of that information for me and answer the question in just a few seconds.

That “in a few seconds” bit is important. At least this point in the beta cycle, every request I give the assistant takes some time. Even tasks like checking my calendar and opening apps have a bit of lag to them on my M2 Vision Pro. This seems to be a side effect of Siri’s new architecture: it can do more, but parsing input, coordinating resources, and performing tasks takes a little longer than you might expect.

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watchOS 27: The MacStories Public Beta Preview

Last year was a quiet year for watchOS. While Apple took a couple of swings with Workout Buddy, Smart Stack hints, and a redesign of the Workout app, watchOS 26 was a scaled-back release compared to the big changes and upgrades in watchOS 11 the year before.

Of those swings, the excellent redesign of the Workout app felt severely hampered by bizarre scrolling behavior, Smart Stack hints didn’t appear often enough, and I found Workout Buddy to be mildly annoying and limited (though it’s true some users had the opposite view).

Let’s not forget the addition of Liquid Glass, too, a design system that was more like a coat of paint for the Apple Watch than the behavioral change seen on iOS.

Out of everything that was added, the wrist flick gesture was my favorite, and something I continue to use throughout the day. I don’t mean to sound down on last year’s release – there were genuine improvements in several areas – but it just felt more like a small evolution.

This year’s WWDC keynote didn’t feature a dedicated watchOS section (or a dedicated section for any particular OS, for that matter), but that’s not to say there’s nothing to see in watchOS 27. In fact, after several weeks of beta use, I see several intriguing things going on here.

So with that obvious tease out of the way, let’s break down what you can expect from watchOS 27.

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macOS 27 Golden Gate: The MacStories Public Beta Preview

The public beta of macOS 27 Golden Gate is out today, and I’m sure many of you are wondering whether to take the plunge and give it a try in advance of its official fall release. That’s the question this preview is here to help answer. It’s not my final take on Golden Gate by any means; after all, I’ve only been using it for about a month, and there will be several more turns in the beta cycle between now and the public release. However, I’ve used Golden Gate long enough to help you make an informed decision about whether or not to install the public beta now.

Of course, it’s impossible for me to account for everyone’s unique Mac setups when considering Golden Gate’s stability, but it’s worth reiterating what I’ve said in past previews: modern Apple betas have been consistently stable. That’s to say, the risks of using the public beta are modest. It’s been years since I’ve had a critical app fail or lost data. I never go into beta season without a backup plan, though. If something goes terribly wrong, I have backups, backups of those backups, and alternate Macs I can switch to in the event of a disaster. I don’t expect to have to go to Plan B, but if you’re going to jump on the Beta Bus, you should have a Plan B, too.

Okay, you’ve been warned. Let’s get to the fun part.

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Siri AI and Apple’s Trickle-Up Strategy

The new Siri AI in iOS 27.

The new Siri AI in iOS 27.

In the month that I’ve been using iOS 27 (launching in public beta today) and the new Siri AI, I’ve come to a few conclusions: Siri AI is a much better Siri and will (probably) be a massive success; the newfound chatbot capabilities of Siri will pose a serious threat to OpenAI and the vast majority of free ChatGPT users they have; and the new Siri is (again, probably) not for me at the moment. At the very least, it can’t be right now given its lack of support for third-party apps and technical issues I’ve encountered during beta testing.

It took me a while to accept the fact that Siri AI can’t be the kind of AI assistant I’d spend hours working with every day. But after testing iOS 27’s new Siri experience every day (and breaking it often in the process), I think that’s okay – and, arguably, what Apple is shooting for at the moment.

The new Siri AI is not designed for people who have grown accustomed to working with frontier models and agents such as Claude Code and Codex. The first version of Siri AI can’t be considered an “agent”, nor can it be compared to products from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google that are targeting power users living at the bleeding edge of AI. If you go into Siri AI thinking that it’s Apple’s answer to ChatGPT Work or Claude Cowork for long-running tasks or deep research queries, you’re going to be disappointed – like I initially was.

Instead, Siri AI carries all the typical traits of a new Apple product: it’s a user-friendly experience designed for the masses, without any of the complexities that define a power-user tool, for better or worse. This is how Apple rolls: they don’t start from a high power-user ceiling and let products trickle down to consumers; they always start from the consumer level and refine, iterate, and extend until products trickle up to power users. This perspective isn’t meant to excuse the (many) current flaws of Siri AI. (More on them below.) It’s just the necessary lens for understanding how Apple is addressing their AI shortcomings in a way that doesn’t betray the company’s soul and design ethos.

There will be plenty more to say about iOS 27, the improved Shortcuts app, Liquid Glass tweaks, and other system enhancements later this year. After all, I have a review to write. Today’s column is merely an opportunity for me to reason through the obstacles I’ve faced with Siri AI and the way I’ve had to re-learn how to think about Siri.

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Halide: Unlock Your iPhone Camera [Sponsor]

If you read MacStories, you’ve likely heard of Halide. For nine years, it’s been the definitive iPhone “pro camera app,” garnering an Apple Design Award, and happy users all over the world. Two years ago, Halide added Process Zero, a feature that lets your iPhone take photos free of AI and algorithms in the spirit of analog photography. Halide Mark III takes that to the next level with its new Looks, Photo Lab, and streamlined design.

Halide Mark III now produces gorgeous photos straight out of camera, thanks to film-inspired Looks developed in partnership with renowned Hollywood colorist Cullen Kelly. For the times you feel like fine-tuning things, Mark III includes a powerful image lab that makes it easy to dial in a perfect look in seconds.

Chip shortages are hitting everyone’s wallets, so we’ve decided to run our first sale in three years, exclusively for MacStories readers. This week only, you can get Halide for 25% off your first year with offer code MACSTORIES2026SUB, or 25% off a one-time-purchase with offer code MACSTORIES2026OTP.

Our thanks to Halide for sponsoring MacStories this week.