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Can you make a floor plan on a perfectly ordinary iPhone?

Yes. An iPhone without Pro in its name cannot scan the room, but it can draw it — and a drawn floor plan is every bit as measured as a scanned one, if the measurements are right.

What a regular iPhone can and cannot do

In this context, the difference between a regular iPhone and a Pro model comes down to one piece of hardware: the LiDAR sensor, the small dark dot beside the camera lenses. It only sits in the Pro and Pro Max models. If your phone does not have it, it cannot measure distances by sending out pulses of light — and so it cannot produce a 3D scan of a room.

Everything else, it can do. Your regular iPhone can draw, calculate, save, show 3D, produce a PDF and share. A floor plan is, in the end, geometry and numbers, and it is not the sensor that produces those — it is the measurements.

How to make the floor plan on an iPhone without LiDAR

The process has three steps, and the middle one is what decides the quality.

1. Sketch the home freehand. One page per floor, no measurements yet. Just the rooms, doors and windows in the right order relative to each other.
2. Measure with a tape measure or a laser distance meter. Each room's two sides, the diagonal, the wall thickness in a door reveal, and the width of doors and windows plus the distance from the nearest corner. Write everything down in centimetres.
3. Draw it in the app. In HouseSense you drag out a rectangle with your finger on a digital sheet of graph paper — that becomes a room. Then you type in the measurements, and the drawing conforms to the numbers.

The order matters: your finger decides the shape, the tape measure decides the size. Try to hit 4.12 m by dragging precisely enough with a finger on a 6-inch screen, and you will lose. Type the number in instead.

The sum that shows why the measurements are enough

A room measures 4.12 m × 3.05 m internally. The area is 4.12 × 3.05 = 12.57 m². That figure is exactly as correct whether it comes from a LiDAR scan or from your own tape measure. A scanner is faster, but it is no more true than a tape measure laid correctly.

Do always test, though, whether the room is square: the diagonal of a rectangular room measuring 4.12 × 3.05 should be the square root of (16.97 + 9.30) = 5.13 m. If you measure 5.21 m, the room is out of square, and the drawing needs to show it that way. That is exactly the kind of thing a scan catches by itself — and that you need to catch yourself when measuring by hand.

Can Apple's Measure app be used instead of a tape measure?

The Measure app sits on every recent iPhone, even without LiDAR, and uses the camera and motion sensors to estimate distances. It is good for getting a rough sense — "the sofa is about 2 m" — but without LiDAR it is estimating, not measuring: it works the depth out from the image, and on a smooth white wall in dim light it has nothing to anchor to.

Use it to cross-check, not to decide. If the figure is going towards flooring, a kitchen, curtains or a contractor's quote, it needs to come from a tape measure or a laser distance meter. A simple laser distance meter from the hardware shop is cheap next to what a wrong measurement costs, and it is the best help if you have to measure up an entire home on your own.

Is the screen too small to draw on?

No, but it requires the app to be built for it. Two things decide whether it can be done with a finger on a phone screen:

• The figures need to be typeable, not draggable. Once a measurement can be typed in to the exact centimetre, your finger's precision no longer matters to the result.
• Walls need to snap together. If you drag one room up against another, the two walls need to become a single shared wall — otherwise you end up with a 3 mm gap between living room and kitchen that no one can see on screen, but that throws off the area.

Both are in place in HouseSense, which is why a home can be drawn to completion on an iPhone. If you have an iPad to hand, it is nicer to draw on — but it is not necessary, and the file is the same, because the home lives in your own iCloud and follows you to both devices.

What you get from a drawn home on a regular iPhone

Once the rooms are drawn and the measurements typed in, there is no difference between a drawn and a scanned home in HouseSense. You get:

• A to-scale floor plan with measurements, as a PDF.
• Areas per room and for the whole home, floor by floor.
• A 3D model of the home, built from the plan.
• A takeoff for contractor quotes — floor area, wall area, ceiling area and the length of skirting — calculated from the measurements you entered yourself.
• Reports you can send to a contractor, a buyer, or your own checklist.

There is one thing neither a drawn nor a scanned plan can decide: whether a wall is load-bearing. Only a building surveyor or an engineer can say that, however neat the drawing is.

When is a regular iPhone actually the better choice?

When you already know the home. Sitting in your own flat with a tape measure, you already know where the rooms are; all you need is the numbers, and you can get those in an hour. A scan would have saved you the measuring, but not the job of straightening out crooked corners afterwards.

A Pro model with LiDAR is strongest in the opposite case: a stranger's house, five minutes to spare, and a lot of alcoves and bay windows you would never have spotted on your own. If you go house hunting every weekend, that is the argument for borrowing a Pro. If you just need your own home drawn once, your regular iPhone is plenty.

Checklist before you start

1. A tape measure at least 5 m long — or a laser distance meter.
2. A sketch of each floor on paper, so you know how many rooms are coming.
3. Measurements at floor height, internally from corner to corner, in centimetres.
4. Remember the diagonal in each room and the wall thickness in one door reveal per wall type.
5. Draw the rooms in the app, type in the measurements, and finally spot-check one measurement per floor with the tape measure.