MOVAhome

I’m using MOVAhome to control my Mova P10 pro ultra and while it’s functional, it has several areas where it needs to improve. The interface is a little non-intuitive and it’s hard to manage jobs and set up schedules. As the vacuum cruises the house, it scans and updates the overall floor plan, but if it is able to see through an outside door, for example, it will create what I will call an infinity room with angled walls going out at 30° and then just fades to nothing. Once one of these is added there really isn’t a way to get rid of them. You can’t really edit the map to delete rooms. Overall, so far I love the vacuum. I just wish I could manage it a little bit better so that I can count on it to run jobs in selected rooms at selected times that I choose. For now I’m having to manually start every job except for one that cleans up the laundry room twice a day.

One of the great mysteries of this app is the ever-present “1” badge that refuses to go away. You open the app, poke around like you’re looking for buried treasure, and… nothing. If an alert doesn’t tell you what it’s alerting you about, what’s the point? Renaming a room is another adventure—it’s tucked so deep in the settings you half expect a prize for finding it. And the map? It’s apparently living its own life, adding ghostly room extensions after every cleaning run. The robot seems unbothered, but the map looks like it’s slowly losing its mind.

Edited to raise to 4 stars. First the snag. The app kept telling me to connect my phone to 2.4 GHz wifi when it was already connected to 2.4 GHz. Instant fail with no recovery option. Turns out your phone has to ALLOW CHANGES to location settings. The internet info I could find only tells you location services must be turned on. If you have enhanced security on your phone and disallow location setting changes, the setup will fail with no explanation. The phone has to allow changes to location service settings for the duration of the setup. The failure mode when this ability isn’t active is completely misleading. The setup just crashes. Other than this, the app is great. I’ve used robot vacs for several years. This app has all the control features I expected and a few I didn’t expect. Organization isn’t always intuitive, but the app responsiveness is snappy, so looking around doesn’t take much time. If you can’t find something, you’re probably looking in the wrong place. The written functions aren’t always completely understandable. Pay attention to the pics when offered. They make sense, especially after playing with the app a couple of days.