Dog Mode
Your home, optimized for your dog.
Hannah Franklin, an Entrepreneur in Residence, arrived at Moon Creative Lab recently with a simple idea: Google Home for dogs. We started with hardware — smart scent diffusers and related Smart Home controllers. Then we pivoted to something more immediate: a single-tap mobile app that sets your lights, temperature, blinds, and audio to conditions that keep your dog calm and comfortable while you’re away. I built that app — Dog Mode — over the past several weeks and we published it on the Apple App Store.
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 works through Google Home’s open APIs. Any Matter-compatible device already paired with your Home — thermostats, smart bulbs, TVs, smart speakers — is automatically discoverable. There’s no separate hub, no second setup flow. If Google Home runs your house, Dog Mode runs your house for your dog.
The four core screens of the Dog Mode iOS app.
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.
Building With AI
Almost as interesting as the app is how I built it. Dog Mode is the first product I’ve taken end-to-end with AI coding tools in the driver’s seat — Claude Code as the primary engineer, with me as the product designer, reviewer, and editor.
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.