Dog Mode
Your home, optimized for your dog.
Dog Mode began as a one-line brief from Hannah Franklin, an Entrepreneur in Residence at Moon Creative Lab: Google Home, but for your dog.
We chased that idea into hardware first — the world’s first Matter smart home scent diffuser and a set of supporting controllers, purpose-built for pets. But hardware is slow to build, and here it was a little too narrow. So we changed course and hit on something that stuck: a single tap that sets your home’s lights, temperature, blinds, and video and audio to the conditions a dog finds soothing. I quickly built that app, Dog Mode, and we published it in the Apple App Store in May 2026.
The Product
Dog Mode sets your smart home to dog-friendly conditions when you leave. One tap and the environment shifts — climate, light, video, sound — to keep your dog comfortable and engaged while you’re out. When you’re back, one tap puts everything back where it was.
It can be triggered by the dog or the human. The dog gets a wireless button mounted to the wall that they can press, and the human gets control on their phone.
It works through Google Home’s SDK and allows control of devices already paired with your Home — thermostats, smart bulbs, TVs, smart speakers and many more. There’s no separate hub, no second setup flow. If Google Home runs your house, Dog Mode runs your house for your dog.
The 3D-printed button, and an early demo of Dog Mode in use.
How It’s Built
Dog Mode is a React Native iOS app. The interface layer is TypeScript; smart-home control runs through a thin Swift bridge to the Google Home iOS SDK. Devices appear automatically because Google Home is already the source of truth for the user’s home.
iOS 17 or later, Google Home account required. Available on the App Store.
The four core screens of the Dog Mode iOS app.
Building With AI
Dog Mode is the first mobile app (React Native) I built with an LLM assisting — I learned a bunch of efficiency lessons, and found some limits of Opus 4.6 in Claude Code.
Along the way I built DriftCheck — a tool that catches design-system drift as the model writes code, so consistency is enforced in the loop rather than patched up later.
I wrote an essay about the workflow that got Dog Mode shipped — the wall I hit early, how slicing Figma mockups changed everything, and why the last 20% is where the work actually lives.
Role. Product Designer. iOS Engineer.