Home sound alerts & live listening
Home Listen
Know when something happens at home, without recording it.
A spare Android phone can keep an ear on a room. Home Listen listens for the sounds that matter, tells you when it hears one and leaves everything else on the phone.
- Ownership
- A WianTribe product
- Year
- 2026
- Platform
- Android · iPhone web app
- Status
- In development
Overview
- Our role
- Product strategy
- Mobile engineering
- Real-time audio
- Backend and security
- Disciplines
- Application Development
- Product Engineering
- Privacy & Security
The phone that stays at home listens for possible crying, dog sounds, knocks or doorbells and loud sounds. When it hears one, it sends an alert to paired phones, and in Live + Guardian mode a paired phone can also listen in.
Home Listen is a WianTribe product in active development. We designed and built the Android app, the iPhone Home Screen listener, the pairing and access rules, the alert delivery and the server behind it.
The problem
A listening app has to earn trust first.
An app that listens to a home is only useful if the people living there trust it. It needs to be clear when the microphone is on, who can listen, and what leaves the phone.
Phones also make it difficult. Batteries, background limits, mobile networks and iPhone browser restrictions can all interrupt a connection, and the app has to be honest about that rather than promise more than it can do.
How we handled it
Listening starts at home and stays visible.
Monitoring is started on the home phone, with a visible microphone notification and a Stop action. It never starts from a push message, a restart or a remote request, and Stop at home closes capture and every connection.
Detect sounds on the phone
Sound detection runs locally with the YAMNet model. Only details about the alert reach the server, and no audio recordings are saved.
Pairing is invited, limited and revocable
Pairing links expire after 10 minutes, up to five listening phones can be paired, and access can be revoked from the home phone at any time.
Be clear about the limits
Sound detection can miss or mistake sounds, and battery settings or a lost connection can interrupt monitoring. Home Listen is not an emergency alarm, and the app says so.
Home Listen in pictures
Key capabilities
What Home Listen does.
- 01
Guardian mode
Listens for possible crying, dog sounds, knocks or doorbells and loud sounds, with live listening turned off.
- 02
Live + Guardian
Adds encrypted live audio over WebRTC, so a paired phone can listen while sound alerts keep working.
- 03
Rules for each kind of sound
Choose which sounds alert you, with quiet hours and cooldowns so one noisy moment does not become a stream of notifications.
- 04
Alerts on Android and iPhone
Android phones get push notifications, and iPhones get Web Push through the Home Screen web app, even without a live audio connection.
- 05
Different levels of access
Caregiver, alerts-only and expiring guest access are enforced by the server and the database rules, not just hidden in the interface.
- 06
History and smart home
A searchable event history with daily counts and configurable retention, plus optional Home Assistant integration through MQTT.
Engineering
What keeps it private and reliable.
Most of the work is in the rules about who can connect, and in recovering when a phone or a network gets in the way.
- 01
Access is checked on the server
Viewers cannot enroll themselves, change who is paired, start sharing, read push tokens or reach another viewer's session. Revoking a phone removes its access to signaling and future alerts.
- 02
Short-lived sessions
Each listening phone has one current session, replaced when it reconnects and expiring after two hours.
- 03
Alerts that are retried, not lost
A bounded outbox retries failed push requests using stable event IDs, so a temporary failure does not quietly drop an alert.
- 04
More than one way to connect
Cloud mode uses a Cloudflare Worker and Firebase for pairing and signaling. An optional Tailscale mode connects phones directly over a private network.
- 05
Tested beyond the screens
Automated checks cover the API, the web listener, the database rules, the Flutter interface and the connection protocol.
Technology
Built with
- Flutter
- Dart
- Kotlin
- YAMNet on-device sound detection
- WebRTC
- Firebase Auth, Firestore & FCM
- Cloudflare Workers
- Web Push
- Tailscale
- Home Assistant · MQTT
Need help with something similar?
These are the WianTribe services most closely connected to the work shown in Home Listen.
- Mobile App Development
Mobile apps built around how people actually use a phone: quickly, one-handed and often while doing something else.
- Backend Development & Integrations
The parts users rarely see but notice immediately when they stop working: APIs, data, accounts and integrations.
Let’s talk
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