I was able to make quite some progress with both the phone app as well as hardware. Check the repo here:

https://github.com/ExploreEmbedded/hornbill-our

When I started out with this project, I wanted to know why some of the well funded Kickstarter projects did not deliver. Here are my reasons!

• Complexity: Adding all the remotes out there in the wild is an up-heal task. Especially for a closed source project. There is a database of remotes called irdb.tk which hosts most of these remotes which could be utlilzed
• Generic UI: Simply listing all the buttons on the pane will not make a good UI and customize all the remotes is also quite a lot of work. So trying to build custom UI even for all the major brands out there would have been a huge time sunk.
• Cost of Electronics and Plastics: If the projects were prototyped on Arduino, batteries would have gone for a toss. If the hardware used was a generic dev board, getting to a lower price point would have been challenge. Also the costs of making a mold with a fancy case!

So this looks like a perfect DIY project for makers and hobbyist instead of a product. I will shoot a demo video soon and post it. I am thinking of making the code a bit more generic to add remotes and even support custom UIs other IR protocols etc., what do you think?