September 2024

State of the Union

I always begin the annual major release announcement with a letter. If you’re looking for What’s New details, scroll down to that section below.

Another year has passed, Roomie’s 13th birthday on the App Store was just weeks ago. The first years (2011-2015) were crazy. Everything was changing all the time. How should apps be sold, should you buy the app itself, or buy things inside the app? Eventually Apple allowed subscriptions, which we adopted in V2, and the chaos took many years to settle down. Somewhat randomly, different types of apps seem perfectly normal to use classes of purchasing that other apps do not. For instance, a game can sell the same thing an infinite number of times. Non-games need to use subscriptions to get the closest amalgam to that, but it’s not very close.

The early App Store years were a very developer and sales oriented world. You had to be able to respond quickly on the technical side to the way the market was developing. Competitors would pop up and drop like flies. Every year another five at least were suddenly the latest thing and gone the next year or two.

Early on, perhaps most notably around 2014, there was a raging debate about hard button remotes. Some users took a hard line and said they must have hard buttons, and they went down the Harmony path. Others foresaw that world was not going to last, everything was moving to phones, phones were attaching to humans like clothing, phones had significantly better screens and controls, and the original problem all along had been too many hard button remotes. I still have whole boxes full of old Harmony and the like long past. Yet they are an inspiration. Since the death of Harmony now many years ago, and the annual hard buttons still starting up and again dying, I’ve wondered why things went as they did, why did hard buttons last so much longer than they should have?

For one thing, Roomie never really had any marketing. Even in 2015-2016 when we took a bit of funding, the most we ever spent on marketing in a year was perhaps $200K – which is basically lunch money in marketing. Meanwhile, today’s App Store is a fully marketing-driven world. Developers and even Sales are distant concepts. Apps named with innovative names like “•TV Remote@” (I’m making that name up, but I’ll bet you 50+ like it exist with different punctuation of course) spend as much as $1 million per month on marketing to unsuspecting users according to third-party tracking services. That’s monthly, not annual. And they make much more than that, especially in lower income countries.

That’s not a world we play in, but it’s something I watch closely as that is where the average App Store consumer globally is spending their money. It reminds me very much of that hysteria in ~2014 when some users were fooled into going down the Harmony path by marketing and “influencers” – have no doubt that was a paid campaign that fooled you if you took a ride in the cattle car. We knew on the technical side that was folly. In 2017, Roomie as a company was inches away from joining the Harmony folks, but in the end it didn’t go forward. It was clear the people there knew the writing was on the wall even then. Hard button remotes were just not architecturally the way to control the world that was coming into view.

What was coming is now widely apparent to all. It’s a world with fewer media players (we hardly knew ye Boxee, Mede8er, Oppo, and so many more), greatly increased importance of media guides due to non-linear content taking over (something no hard button could ever handle properly), a significantly increased focus on the complexities of the entire Home rather than just a room with a single TV, the death of Cable TV and all the cable boxes/cards associated with it, and the end of many TV channels combined with almost all of the streaming services now struggling through this transition.

The old coffee table covered with 10 remotes solved by purchasing a Harmony just didn’t exist anymore, and it was clear from their sales. Yet some people, aided by lots of marketing money and with specific “influencers” of the tech press in cahoots, kept pushing the idea of a hard button remote. Whatever is left in that market at this point usually resembles an annual Kickstarter campaign that quickly disappears.

Meanwhile, the real money is as per above in the much cheaper “control my TV” type stuff, and the winner there today is whoever spends the most on marketing. These are users who don’t know better, and really have no idea what a Receiver or even a UHD BD player might be. Imagine the average 23 year old in Brazil. The world is a big place, and New people are born all the time. Roomie does not try to compete for that.

So here we are, 13 years later (actually about 15 since Ben and I started this project), it’s a totally different market, but we know we’re the best in the whole home control app space. I call it a space, but I can’t name any genuine competitors. Of course, there are the high end control systems at $25K+ (realistically, you’re paying $100K+ because you’re not just buying a control system), and those are the only real comparables. By that token, as I’ve often pointed out, we are so inexpensive that the low price of our app literally makes us look bad. When we had some funding and outside sales/marketing people in 2015-2016, those people tried various ways to raise pricing and it was all fruitless. The best excuse is that significantly more funding might have solved that. Perhaps. Our best pricing indicators were actually in the 2010-2014 era when everything was based on in-app purchases and it was just the two of us that started the company, so I’m not sure about that.

At this point, one thing is certain. Roomie has been and will be here for the long haul. There is not one direct competitor alive from when we started, hard button, app, or otherwise. We will keep adapting to the whims of the market over time.

From a subscription perspective, no real changes this year. Selling Perpetual reached the end of its road at the end of 2023, so it is no longer offered and unlikely to appear again in the future. If it does appear briefly in the future for those that periodically ask me about it, I’d recommend grabbing it immediately if you are okay with staying on V9 indefinitely. Since there are still people running V4.5.11, I assume such people do exist. I come from a security background, so the idea of not updating to the latest release just seems insane to me, and we have made many critical fixes over the years, but there are still more people on V4.5.11 (which only runs up to iOS 9) than you can imagine. So those on Perpetual are good to stay on today’s major release, V9, for as long as they want, and V9 will of course get any features over the next year until Roomie X or Roomie 10 or whatever we call it. Perpetual included 3 years of bug fixes from the date Perpetual was purchased, so any critical maintenance will also continue beyond the next year. How the people running V4.5.11 are still going is a complete mystery to me, but I love the concept which at this point is akin to collecting old toys. Note that as announced last Fall, we have resumed counting homes/activities/devices this year.

Enough nostalgia. This really has been a great year for Roomie. We have created several other apps in recent years, and we felt this year it was necessary to return our focus entirely to the core app: Roomie Remote. Creating V9 was a return to form, like getting the band back together, revisiting many areas that had long gone unchanged, rethinking some of the original design ideas that go all the way back to V5. It’s also opened doors for the future as you’re likely to see more enhancements in these areas going forward now that their core has been updated.

Without further ado, here is the screenshot-annotated version of the What’s New list. As we’re not limited to the App Store’s Unicode 4,000 character limit here, screenshots help illustrate some points. The Setup Guide has also been updated.

What’s New in Roomie Remote V9

• [9.1] Apple TV Primary Controller: The Apple TV edition has been significantly revised to bring it up to par with the iOS edition for serving as a Primary Controller. The interface has been revamped and underlying infrastructure matched up to support most scenarios equivalent to the iOS edition. Activity Dashboard and Weather display have also been added. Instructions for running Roomie TV in Single App Mode (the Guided Access equivalent for tvOS) are now in the Knowledge Base. Single App Mode is not required but recommended if using Roomie TV as a Primary.
• Configuration storage and synchronization is now local to the Primary Controller rather than stored in the cloud. Since V5, we have used a couple of different cloud storage solutions, but their only real use case was for offsite control. As Roomie is always used within the home or by VPN to the home, moving to pure local storage with local synchronization works better, is more secure (eliminating the entire class of security issues associated with cloud storage), and is notably faster.
• Automatic Backups: Daily and monthly automated configuration backups may now be executed to your choice of location.
• Controller Permissions: Each Controller now has permissions for the Home, either Full Access or Read-Only.
• Multiroom Linked Activities: Using the same media player in multiple rooms is now recognized as a Linked Activity. Such Activities can be activated together with the new Link button. Opening the volume controller for such an Activity displays all related volumes along with global mute controls.
• Inline Action Panel Editing: Entering Layout mode for the current Action Panel allows inline customization of your remote in a simple user interface.
• Weather: Current, daily, or hourly weather is now displayed throughout the app including the Homebar, Dashboard, and optionally per-room.
• Sunset/Sunrise Automation: Execution based on solar-related time events is now available for Time-based Automations.
• Keyboard in Action Panel is now displayed with a live entry field and does not submit until you finalize it. This makes text entry much simpler and fixes apps that constantly auto-accept your input before you’re finished typing such as YouTube for Apple TV.
• Shortcuts/Siri: Everything related to these features has been re-implemented using the latest Apple API to support current and upcoming changes. Your old Shortcuts migrate automatically, but some degree of adaptation may be required. Please verify your Shortcuts and let us know if you had to adjust anything.
• Primary Controller can now be app-locked requiring Touch ID/Face ID by tapping the lock icon on the “Primary” button. This feature enables situating your Primary Controller in an unsecured environment without worrying about unauthorized access.
• Air Quality Sensor and TVOC are now displayed when available for HomeKit Sensors.
• HomeKit Custom Icons: Active and Inactive icons may now be configured for each HomeKit accessory.
• Inactive Activity Icons: Activities may now specify an Inactive icon to use when the Activity is not active.
• Color Icons and Symbols: Thousands of additional symbols are available as well as support for multicolor symbols.
• Fixes and optimizations to Govee, Wattbox, Nest, Ring, and others.
• Many other fixes and improvements throughout the app.
• V9 is incompatible with older versions of Roomie. They will simply be ignored. Make sure to update all Roomie devices on all platforms. Installing the new version over the old automatically upgrades. If you fresh install instead, restoring an older backup also upgrades automatically.
• Minimum system requirements are now Apple’s Fall 2023 OS releases: iOS/iPadOS/tvOS 17, macOS 14.