Which permissions does HouseSense ask for — and why?
Camera to scan rooms, and location for the north arrow and the sun calculation — the app does not ask for contacts, microphone or tracking.
Short answer: HouseSense asks for two things. Camera is used for the LiDAR scan, when you measure up a room. Location and compass heading are used to point the north arrow correctly on the floor plan and to calculate the sun's path over the home. Both can be declined: without the camera you can still draw the home on the graph paper, and without location you can place the house on the map and turn the north arrow by hand. If you want to save a file to your photo library, iOS asks for permission right there and not before. The app doesn't ask for contacts, microphone, calendar, or permission to track you.
Camera: only for the scan itself
LiDAR scanning needs camera access because the iPhone uses both the laser rangefinder and the camera image together to keep track of where the phone is in the room, and to recognise whether a surface is a door, a window or a table. Without the camera, there is no scan.
What gets saved afterwards is not video. HouseSense stores a description of the room: walls with position and height, openings with dimensions, and recognised furniture types as boxes. The camera is on while you're scanning, and not afterwards.
If you say no to the camera, the rest of HouseSense still works. In HouseSense you can draw the home on a piece of graph paper with your finger: you place walls to measure, add doors and windows, and get the same areas, the same takeoff, and the same 3D model that a scan would produce. It is also the way to go if you're standing in a home where raising your phone would feel wrong.
Location: for the north arrow and the sun
Location is used for two concrete things, and they're connected. The north arrow on the floor plan needs to point correctly for the plan to say anything about which rooms face south. And the sun calculation needs to know where on the globe the home is, in order to work out the sun's height and direction on a given date — the sun sits markedly differently at high latitudes than close to the equator, and the difference between the summer and winter solstice is the whole point of a daylight study.
The permission is of the "while using the app" kind. HouseSense doesn't follow you around in the background, and the location is never sent to a developer's server — there isn't one. The home's location travels with the home into your own private iCloud, and stays there.
If you say no to location, you don't lose the daylight study. You can instead place the house on the map manually and rotate the north direction to match. It's a little more work, and just as accurate, if you put the house in the right place.
Photo library: only when you save something yourself
If you want to save a file from HouseSense to your photo library, iOS asks permission at that moment. The permission is "add to" — placing something in, not reading through your existing photos. If you never use that feature, you're never asked.
What the app does not ask for
Just as important as the list above is what isn't on it. HouseSense does not ask for:
- Contacts. Sharing happens with a code you send yourself, not by the app reading your address book.
- Microphone. No audio is recorded, not even during a scan.
- Calendar or reminders.
- Permission to track you across apps. That dialog never even appears, because there's no advertising or analytics system in the app to track you with.
- A user account. No email, no password, no profile.
Where iCloud fits in
iCloud isn't a permission you're asked about inside the app — it's the account you're already signed into on your iPhone. HouseSense writes your homes to your own private iCloud database, so the same home can be opened on your iPad. The developer has no access to that space.
If you want to avoid it entirely, you can turn iCloud off for HouseSense in the iOS settings, under your Apple ID. Your homes then stay local to the device alone. The cost is that there's no longer any syncing between your devices, and a lost phone is also a lost home — so if you go that route, export the floor plan as a PDF once the work is done.
How to check and change the permissions afterwards
A no is never final. In the iOS settings you can find HouseSense and see exactly which permissions the app has been given, and switch them on and off individually. That goes for both camera and location.
A good habit if you're ever unsure about an app — any app: give it as little as possible to start with, and see what stops working. An app that asks for something it doesn't obviously use is worth being sceptical of.
Short summary
HouseSense asks for camera access for the LiDAR scan, and location for the north arrow and the sun calculation. Both can be declined without the app becoming unusable — there's a drawing path without the camera, and a manual north direction without location. It doesn't ask for contacts, microphone or tracking, and there's no user account. Your homes live on your device and in your own private iCloud.