My Watchdog

Build a free home security system

Free From Ralf Andrae, andraeweb.de Made For iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch Needs iOS 8.0 or later

Would you trust your home security to a free app? Maybe not, but MyWatchdog works well enough it could be considered an interesting proof-of-concept. The idea is to turn your iPhone and seven other iOS devices connected through the same iCloud account into “a reliable and professional alarm system.”

Your iPhone acts as a central monitor, controlling all connected devices as sensors to provide motion, noise, or video-based feedback using each piece of hardware’s accelerometers, microphone, and cameras. It’s a pretty neat idea and not terribly difficult to set up, so if you have a bunch of old iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch devices lying around your home, then MyWatchdog is definitely worth a look.

Events can also be remotely accessed from Apple Watch, which includes viewing a map of where motion sensors have been triggered, and even viewing video recorded whenever a motion event takes place. Video must first be downloaded to your Watch, so the latter is hampered by the limitations of watchOS, which reduce transfer speeds when Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are both enabled. You can also activate and deactivate the entire alarm system right from your wrist.

In Live View, unused iOS devices act as cheap home monitors, where the main iPhone can peek in to see and hear what’s going on in your home any time of day. However, for obvious reasons

this doesn’t work on Apple Watch, and an in-app purchase is required after the first 10 minutes of use.

the bottom line. It’s not perfect, but MyWatchdog mostly does what it promises, assuming you have the patience and enough spare iOS devices to set it up in the first place.