Homii: 21-Year-Old South Tyrolean Builds an App to End Chore Wars

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Whoever keeps insisting on the cleaning schedule in a shared flat eventually becomes the annoying one, and that is exactly the job Homii wants to take over.

The household app is the work of Matthias Oberhofer. The 21-year-old from South Tyrol studies business, health and sports tourism at the University of Innsbruck’s Landeck campus and builds Homii on the side, alone and without investors. According to the website, the idea grew out of his own frustration with flat-share life in Innsbruck, and the app was developed at InnCubator, the startup center run by the University of Innsbruck and the Tyrolean Chamber of Commerce. Artificial intelligence played a central role in the coding, Oberhofer says in a university profile.

The problem Homii wants to solve is familiar to many flat-shares, couples and families: even when chores are written down somewhere, responsibility often ends up with one person, who does the work and also has to remind everyone else. The app aims to spread that mental load across the whole household.

What the App Does

• Algorithm-based chore schedule: Homii automatically assigns tasks to whoever has contributed least recently. Reminders come as push notifications from the app instead of from flatmates.
• Points and levels: Every completed task earns experience points, such as 50 for cleaning the bathroom or 15 for taking out the trash. Active users level up, and collected points can be exchanged for rewards.
• Swapping chores: Anyone in the middle of exams or on vacation can swap tasks with others in one click.
• Shared kitty: Expenses are logged and split fairly, and the app calculates who owes whom how much. Debts can be settled directly via PayPal.
• Shopping list and votes: A shared shopping list syncs in real time, and the flat can vote on purchases such as a new TV directly in the app.

What Homii Costs

The core features are free and ad-free. According to the App Store, Oberhofer charges €4.99 or €29.99 a year for Premium, deliberately per household rather than per person. “A household app only works if everyone takes part,” he says of the model. Premium includes unlimited receipts, financial statistics for the flat and room for up to eight flatmates.

The app has been available for iPhone and Android since late April and is still young: it has more than 100 downloads on Google Play, and the App Store does not yet have enough ratings to show an average.

Tough Competition in the Flat-Share Market

Homii is entering a crowded market. The best-known alternatives include Flatastic, which also combines a chore schedule, shopping list and finances, and Splitwise, the international leader in splitting expenses. There are also numerous smaller apps such as OurFlat or Tidy. Oberhofer promotes Homii as having no daily limit on expenses and no ads, two areas where he criticizes the competition. The question is whether that is enough to get flat-shares to switch, since a household app only pays off once every flatmate actually installs it. In Austria, Vienna-based startup Friends in Flats starts one step earlier, helping people find the right room in a shared flat.