The 5 Best Smart Home Apps for High-Tech Living

The mother of all smart home systems, Amazon’s Alexa sets homebodies at ease with its calm, confident voice service and impressive array of features. It can be a little tricky to get the hang of all the controls, but the Alexa app’s deep-dive interface gives you the power to harness all manner of gadgets, including speakers, light bulbs, thermostats, garage doors, and more. Alexa is fully integrated with Matter, so even off-brand, non-Amazon devices can work fluidly under Alexa’s command.

When used with the hub of the same name, the Samsung SmartThings app gives you the most adaptability of any smart home system: It’s compatible with hundreds of brands and several thousand types of TVs, speakers, appliances, and other devices. Its easy-to-use interface makes it simple to set up automated routines and presents all your devices in widgets you can tap and toggle between.

The app comes preinstalled on Samsung Galaxy phones, but you can also download it on iPhone and Google Pixel devices, and you can recruit Google Assistant for voice commands too. We also recommend it over Apple HomeKit and the Apple Home app, which (according to its dismal reviews on the App Store) is incompatible with a lot of non-Apple devices and also requires investing in more than one HomePod for multiple admin users.

IFTTT is a standalone app that doesn’t require a hub, as it lets you set up automation routines (or applets, as the app calls them). The app takes its name from a programming principle known as “if this, then that,” and the design emphasizes flexibility and creativity in setting up personal applets. But you can also choose from a variety of preset ones—it can fire off AI-generated promotional tweets for your blog, schedule your Roomba to start cleaning at the same time every day, and much more.

The free version of IFTTT lets you set up two applets. But if you really want to get all your home gadgets coordinated in interfunctional ballet, we recommend springing for the Pro+ plan ($5/mo.), which includes unlimited applets and lets you really nerd out with its AI services, developer tools, and priority technical support.

The Google Home app used to work best for Google Assistant and devices like the Nest cameras, doorbells, and smoke alarms. But its 2023 redesign and recent integration with Matter make the app a whole lot more useful for non-Google gadgets too.

You can manage your smart home over both Android and iOS phones, and the user-friendly interface includes a new Favorites page that makes it easy to access the tasks you use every day. Another nifty thing is that you can control multiple devices simultaneously—for example, by automating your living room lights to turn on whenever you close the curtains.

Google Home also has a lot of great features for smart cameras. For example, you can monitor what’s going on directly from the app, and you can toggle between different view options (including grid view and individual camera views) if you’re running multiple cameras.

Home Assistant relies on the same “if this, then that” principles as IFTTT, allowing for your smart home devices to communicate with each other and respond to conditional automations. And you can set it all up without having to invest in a hub!

The app is built on an open-source platform that may appeal to hackers and home-networking tinkerers. You can run Home Assistant on a range of operating systems—including Linux and Raspberry Pi.

You can also save energy and increase your privacy by using a local area network (LAN) for many of the app’s functions. Many smart home apps rely on a cloud server to manage all of your gadgets across the home, but Home Assistant lets you manage the bulk of your smart home ecosystem through a self-contained, intranet-style network run from your home computer and Ethernet switches. It’s less user-friendly of an approach, but it gives you a much more customizable, DIY setup.