Point. Snap. Magic.

Series 5 or newer, SE and Ultra included. Maestro points by compass, and the Series 4 doesn't have one. It's a lovely watch that has no idea which way it's facing.

Hidden by Apple, not by Maestro. Apple doesn't expose its own devices (Apple TV, HomePod) to any third-party HomeKit app, so on the Apple Home backend they can't be painted. HomeKit TVs from LG, Samsung, Sony and Vizio show up fine and snap happily. And if your home runs Home Assistant, its media players (Apple TV included) come through that door instead.

Not at all. The snap is just the default trigger. On the watch, scroll to the settings page, find Trigger, and pick Tap: a firm tap of your fingers together counts exactly like a snap. Same aim, same magic, quieter. Tap also works from either wrist, which makes it the answer if you wear the watch on the hand you snap with, and frankly it's the more polite trigger in a meeting.

That spinner belongs to watchOS, not Maestro; every watch app falls into it sometimes. The ladder, in order: open the Watch app on your iPhone, scroll down to Available Apps, and install Maestro from there. Still spinning? Restart both the watch and the iPhone (really; the install queue spans both, and a reboot clears it). Check the watch isn't out of storage. Last resort: delete Maestro from the iPhone, reinstall it, and let the watch copy come down fresh.

Maestro listens while it's front and center on your wrist. (watchOS doesn't let apps watch your arm from the background all day, which is fair; that's your battery they'd be watching it with.) So the game is getting it up fast, and there's a whole ladder of ways.

The one-tap tier: add the Maestro complication to your watch face (the little hand with the sparks), or drop the widget in your Smart Stack. The button tier: grab the ready-made Open Maestro shortcut. One tap adds it; then hang it wherever you like: the Action button on an Ultra, or Control Center on any watch.

The wizard tier, discovered by a beta tester: point a hand gesture at the shortcut we provide. Watch Settings → Accessibility → AssistiveTouch → Hand Gestures, assign Double Clench to the Open Maestro shortcut, and set Activation Gesture to None so AssistiveTouch itself doesn't grab the clench first. Now the whole move is: double clench, then snap. No buttons, no taps, no witnesses who can explain what just happened.

The same gesture knows a second trick: pausing. In the iPhone's Shortcuts app, make a shortcut with Maestro's "Toggle scanning" action. The list shows two Maestro entries; pick the WATCH app's one, even if it looks like a placeholder (that's the right one, and it runs instantly on your wrist). Point Double Clench at that shortcut instead and Maestro pauses with a three-tone chord; clench again and it resumes, chord reversed. Applaud, stir pots, talk with your hands. Your lamps will wait.

And however you launch it: Settings → General → Return to Clock → Maestro → a longer custom time, and it stays up all movie night.

Maestro naps unless your arm is up. Room detection is a six-second Bluetooth sniff now and then (never a continuous scan), and the motion math runs only while the app is on your wrist doing its job. Your watch will still outlive your evening.

Stand where you normally are when you want that device: paint the reading lamp from the couch, not from a tour of the room. Sweep your arm lazily across it for the few seconds, pointing a little past it on each side, like spray painting a dinner plate around it. Use it from two spots? Paint it again from the second one; paints stack. After that the everyday corrections (a room pick here, an "or the reading light?" tap there) keep sharpening it. Day one is good. Day seven is scary good.

The hand on the control screen is a status light. Gray on black: resting, nothing under your aim. Orange on black: mid-aim, still deciding. Green on black: it has a device in mind. The whole screen floods your accent color and the hand goes dark: target locked, snap now and that exact device obeys (a twist dims it, if it dims). Flood means fire.

In practice you'll see green-on-black a lot at the beginning, while it's still learning your house. The full-color flood shows up more and more as the watch gets confident about what you're pointing at. Watching the flood take over IS watching it learn.

Happens on day one, rare by day thirty. Paint the device again from the spot you actually snap at it, and when Maestro offers "…or the reading light?", tap it. Every correction teaches. You're the teacher; the homework is turning on lamps.

No. A snap only counts from a calm, aimed, deliberately moved arm. Couch bumps, steering wheels, and enthusiastic pets have all been field-tested against it. (The field was my couch.)

You can! Point somewhere memorable (the front door is popular), snap, and "Goodnight" runs. But here's the dirty secret of scenes: five minutes after Goodnight, somebody always needs the one lamp that Goodnight turned off. A scene can't help you there. Pointing at the lamp can.

You look like someone whose lights obey a snap of the fingers. History has a word for those people, and it isn't "silly."

It does not. In Home Assistant, make a label called maestro and put it on the entities (or whole devices) you actually want on your wrist. The moment anything wears the label, Maestro shows only the labeled things. Your HA stays the single source of truth; there's no list in Maestro to babysit. No labels anywhere, and you get everything, same as always.

This is also the move when the family starts getting watches and you'd rather they didn't discover the water heater.

Three usual suspects. First, the domain: Maestro shows lights, switches, fans, media players, locks, climate, scenes, scripts, buttons and input_booleans. Second, and sneakiest: the entity has no Area. Maestro organizes everything by Areas, and area-less entities are invisible; re-added integrations often come back without one. Give it an Area and it appears. Third: if anything wears your maestro label, only labeled things show, see the question above.

Yes, today, with the oldest trick in the Home Assistant book: wrap whatever you want in a script and paint the script. A snap runs it. Point at the projector wall, snap, movie mode. The same idea bridges odd hardware through input_booleans. If HA can do it, a script can trigger it, and if a script can trigger it, you can snap at it.

Locks never fire from a gesture alone. The snap arms the action; a deliberate tap on the watch confirms it. Your lamp can afford a mistake. Your deadbolt can't, so it doesn't get to make one.

Maestro listens for your home's Bluetooth ambiance; away from it, gestures politely decline. The map on your iPhone still works from anywhere, though: turning off the lamp you forgot is a feature, not an accident.

Nowhere. No Maestro cloud, no account, no analytics. The pointing model lives on your watch, and commands travel from your wrist to your home. End of trip. The App Store label says "Data Not Collected" because there's nothing to collect it with.

Free forever for one device in one room (the full magic, small stage, on either backend), and $8.99, once, unlocks your whole home, webhooks and the wardrobe. I'm turning off lamps here, not financing a yacht (though maybe part-owning a ranch).

With Unlimited, yes. Five color schemes (Fresh Lime, Clear Sky, Tangerine, Lavender, Bubblegum) repaint the watch app end to end, and eight snap effects decide what happens on screen the moment a device obeys: emphasis marks that settle into the logo's own sparks, a juicy blob of ink, a shockwave, confetti, stardust, glitter. One of the eight is "off", for the purists. There are eight app icons too, picked on the iPhone under Style; your Apple Watch always wears the classic Maestro icon. Free stays on Lavender with three of the effects, which is a complete experience, just a smaller closet.

You can, if your home runs Apple Home. Siri was always there, and Maestro doesn't mind sharing. Home Assistant homes are a different story (take it up with the two of them). But consider: you could say "Hey Siri, turn on the reading light," out loud, in front of guests… or you could point at it and snap. One of these makes you a wizard.

It's a pretty awesome party trick and your guests will think you're a magician. I also find it genuinely useful, which surprised me more than it surprises them.

Depends entirely on what you mean by that. Let's find out together. Pick whichever definition you'd defend in an argument.