Thermos for iPhone and iPad is the first application to let you control your Nest thermostat directly from your iPhone or iPad’s Notification Center. Already available for Mac (read our review), Thermos has now made its way to iOS with a Notification Center widget that allows Nest user to adjust the temperature of the thermostat, as well as setting it to Away, or turning it off altogether.
After downloading the app in the App Store, you simply launch it and sign in to your Nest account. From there, you can select the Nest thermostat you want to control, then add the widget to the Today tab of Notification Center.
Once added to Notification Center, the interface is pretty straightforward. It provides basic conditions about your location, such as humidity, the current temperature in the room, and the target temperature, if set.
You have the ability to decrease or increase temperature by 1, 2, or 5 degrees at a time without having to launch the Thermos app itself or even the Nest app, making it the quickest way to change the temperature of a Nest via iPhone. Finally, you have two buttons to set the thermostat to Away, or just turn it off.
Design-wise, Thermos for iPhone and iPad isn’t the prettiest widget you can think of. I find it to be a little on the busy side. If given the option, I would remove the different temperature buttons and replace them with up and down arrows, similar to the Mac version of Thermos and also similar to how the official Nest app works. Of course, this is a personal opinion, and you might disagree with it.
Because I only have one Nest in my house, I do not have any problem switching between thermostats, but users with several units (ie. one downstairs and one upstairs) might face the main limitation of Thermos. You can have one widget controlling only one Nest at a time in Notification Center. It means that if you want to switch between Nests, you will have to go into the Thermos app and select the default Nest to display in Notification Center.
One solution I have thought about would be to be able to create one widget per Nest. This way, if you have two Nest thermostats in your home, you would have one widget for each of them.
As mentioned above, Thermos is the only Nest widget for iPhone to our knowledge. I have tested this app for a very limited time, but so far, it works just as you would expect, and I would feel comfortable recommending it to any Nest owner.
Thermos for iPhone and iPad is currently available at the special launch price of $1.99 in the App Store. Users who dropped $250 on a Nest probably will see this as a very small price to pay for the convenience it offers.