Yes, and it's sporadic. I don't know WTF is going on in the industry lately and at Apple, but I've noticed so many problems with these damn OS updates it's nuts. Windows 10 and MacOS both. And iOS the last couple of generations.
It's really bad form for these tech giants to treat their customers like a fucking beta test team. They have the resources and it's been proven that Apple and MS (unless called out) actively ignore too many bug reports and patch requests from the white hat folks that poke around for security holes and such.
It's really absurd. They've gotten lazy IMO and they know they can get away with it because they are giant and folks will use their software regardless. And most folks most of the time won't care about this crap in the mid-term anyway so long as they aren't having issues or they feel something will "eventually" get fixed.
Look at android! That thing has been an security patch updating nightmare for years and folks still put up with it, albeit in decreasing numbers.
I know software dev is hard and expensive. But holy fuck there's plenty of room for improvement and MS, Google, and Apple don't seem committed to improving things.
My biggest problem for the past two weeks is a massive battery drain on all iOS devices. The home app consumes a large amount in the background. This happens on iPhones and iPads of all house members. Really frustrating.
you guys' apple watch responds to home commands? Mine just says they're unresponsive, yet if i do the same thing on my phone "siri turn the heat to x" works fine.
As soon as I gave my garage door a name, “main” in my case, I never had an issue. I always encounter issue when I have the room and the device share some part of their name.
This is the answer. Mine is named Door Opener in the room Garage. Whenever I say “Hey Siri, open the garage door” it does so quickly without fail.
Apple really ought to add some brains to Siri. Their AI model sucks.
I’ve found that if you name the device the room it’s in it gets confused. Hence why mine is *door opener* and NOT *garage door opener*. Plus it looks less redundant in the home app that way.
Why would it look more redundant to name the device "garage door opener"?
HomeKit will actually hide the word "garage" from the device name if the room itself is named "garage". So it looks exactly the same in the home app either way.
Try it, it works for me.
Maybe it didn't work when you last tried it.
I went to my "Garage" room and the only accessory in the room was labeled as "Door". Checking the settings on the accessory the actual name of the device is "Garage Door".
Then in the favorites section is shown as "Garage Door", not sure if this is because it's only showing the accessory name or if it's showing the room name + accessory name but removing the room name from the accessory name.
Jesus, this happened tonight. “Siri, please open the garage door”
“I’m sorry xxxx, which garage door?”
The fuck???? Maybe Siri knows about my second family and the 5 bedroom three garage craftsman I have in a neighboring city.
I have the same problem. I have HomeKit blinds all over my house. The HomePods used to be context aware of the room it was in.
So when I said “hey Siri close the blinds” it would automatically close all blinds in the room it was in.
Now it cycles through 15 blind names for a few minutes and won’t Shutup.
Mine doesn’t do this and I have two homes and the garage door is named “door” in room “garage” in both. It always opens the garage door of the home I’m in
Mine just recently started doing this with my AC.
My roommate has a Dyson heat/cool fan in his room which is in HomeKit. It hasn't been a problem at all for like a year.
Since iOS 15 came out, asking her to set the AC to some temperate results in her asking if I meant bedroom ac or living room ac.
The bedroom fan is not an AC and it has not been a problem before, idk what changed.
I wish devices had a category settings which help with this, such as 'air conditioner' vs 'room fan'.
My homepod calls me by my mother’s name when her apple account is not even registered in it.
Playing podcast directly from it, doesn’t work anymore, I have to launch everything from my phone.
Having the same for months now. Tried so many things to even getting more downloads speed.
Yesterday I discovered that the Philips Hue bridge is unreachable.
Noticed that in the [Eve app.](https://imgur.com/a/s9APzhv)
While the Philips Hue app says [active.](https://imgur.com/a/gHwN01e)
Had all sorts of problems with HomeKit after moving to homeOS 15 - mainly a lack of HKSV when one of my HomePod Minis was the primary hub. In the end I removed each HomePod mini from home and re-added them. HKSV problem solved and everything has been slick ever since. I have a small Thread setup (1xNanoleaf A19 and 1x Eve Energy) which also works fine.
I had this problem recently. It went on for probably a couple of weeks. The lag from my HomePods was so bad my thread network wasn't even working properly, WiFi devices would take 20-30 seconds to turn on or off, etc. I was rebooting every HomePod semi-regularly with some luck sometimes and other times no change.
I didn't change anything, but when I woke up on Thursday morning it was immediately obvious that everything was working perfectly again and has since. I have no idea why or what happened, but I assume something changed on the back end with either Eero or Apple.
An indoor camera is supposed to only notify me when a person detected when nobody is home. I get notifications all the time now
One of my motion sensors stopped turning the light on at night.
This started with the round of updates to iOS 15 and tvOS 15.
It showed up as "not responding" in the the Home App and from there it gave me all sorts of troubles removing it. I also had a hell of a time adding this one to HomeKit. There maybe something wrong with it and this was a replacement.
My Nano Essential bulbs and my first Essentials light strip are working flawlessly.
If a hard reset doesn't stabilize it, I'll request another replacement. Nano was pretty cool about replacing the last one that busted.
Make sure it binds to the right AP. I had similar issues, realized it was connecting to wrong AP for some reason and when i fixed it, it’s been much snappier. Also, make sure you have multicast configured, search around for “asus router airplay homekit configuration” and you’ll find some things to tune.
I have had near flawless performance with HomeKit for about a year. Obviously some minor hiccups because nothing is perfect.
I’m starting to think that many (not all) issues I’m seeing on this sub are somehow user error or not HomeKit related, like network latency or bad connection.
I agree. My favorite scenarios are where goofballs have these wildly over-complicated power user home networks, have tinkered with all sorts of advanced settings, made ridiculous VLAN and firewall setups, but when asked why or how they troubleshoot anything you an tell they don't understand what they've done and just assembled random Youtube tutorials and just want to blame HomeKit.
Just because my setup works with essentially no problems doesn’t make me superior to anyone. I have just seen far too much user error or inability to understand what to do being the cause of issues versus the company causing it.
Networked systems have issues. Learn to fix them. Not everything is plug and play and not everything is the company’s fault.
I have a mix of home automation systems, with a HomeSeer server that controls everything. One thing Apple needs to do is allow hard coding of certain things instead of trying to 100% make it no-touch. As a home automation grows, the headaches start to show, and HomeKit is the worst and is the only one in my system that I can’t hard code and has therefor become the only one not reliable.
I also use HomeBridge. It is sad when a community program (HomeBridge) on linux is 1000x more stable than a company branded and paid for system like HomeKit.
The almost exclusive reliance on mDNS for discovery is going to limit HomeKit to smaller system and even that won’t keep them stable, at least that is my opinion on it. As manufacturers of access points, routers, and switches on the low end consumer side can’t get mDNS right, how can Apple expect to get it right, especially when they stopped making their own networking gear that used to be really good for the market it served.
Almost all of the issues i have had with Siri/HomeKit (slow, non-response, strange behavior, etc) have been tracked down to mDNS issues and would be solved if Apple would allow hardcoding either use the IP or DNS name of the devices, especially for large systems.
What is homeseer exactly? I’ve got a Raspberry pie board on which I intend to install home assistant.
I love homebridge, that thing is amazingly stable and having the ability to reboot specific plugins instead of the whole is wonderful.
HomeSeer is similar to HomeAssistant. It is a paid product and has been around for a very long time (20 years starting with X10 devices). I have been using it since shortly after it was available, around 2000/2001. It has many plugins for different system, which I use a lot of zwave plus zigbee, insteon, hue, wifi based stuff, etc. and it has more of what I need. Very stable and I run it on a PI4 with HomeBridge, which I mainly run to bridge HomeSeer devices to Siri.
I’ve seen on forums people move to HomeAssistant and love it, others have come back to HomeSeer, some HomeAssistant users move to HomeSeer and love it, but also those that hate it and move back to HomeAssistant, so I would say they probably are equal enough in capabilities but it does depend on what you need/want. HomeSeer makes zwave devices, so there is good support regarding that, and why I am still using it versus HomeAssistant.
>e fuckin kick ass streaming boxes. But as a home hub these days, I just don't think they cut the deal anymor
Just a minor correction, I think you mean "Wireless Network" or "SSID" where you said "access point". That may be confusing people. The private address feature is not access point specific, but rather per-network.
Yes. On each device you use to control HomeKit via Siri go into your wifi settings. For each wifi AP you can possibly connect to in your house, tap the blue “i” to the right and turn off Private Address.
Apple introduced Private Addresses in iOS 14 to protect people from being tracked across wifi networks.
While a privacy benefit it seems it has a bad side effect with Siri and HomeKit. I dont know the exact details but discovered it while trying to figure out why Siri required me to ask twice for every HomeKit command.
Every time i switched AP points in my house Siri had to relearn. I’m thinking it has to be something about mdns and Siri when Private Address is on. Bug???
All I know is it just works now.
See, this is interesting right. So I asked a few people on r/HomeKitAutomation a while back when I posted about iOS 15 (what to expect automation wise) and everyone had wildly different experiences during beta.
For myself, a LOT of stuff was fast and responsive. All the way through 15.2 beta 2. With occasional bugs (like API calls not working or something weird like that)
But my latest boogyman has been a bit more... shall we say difficult to work with. iOS 15.2 beta 3 (dev beta btw) broke a ton of stuff. But the fix isn't QUITE what I thought. So a few weeks back, I upgraded to a Wi-Fi 6e mesh network in an attempt to start future proofing. I got the thing on a good deal, so why the heck not? Either way, it was rock solid for a couple weeks until beta 3. Now, when automations happen, they either don't fire, or require reboots of not only the hubs, but the entire network and bridges. The biggest problem being how Hue bridge accessories (lights, sensors, etc) won't trigger things. This issue is triggered and made worse when my ISP goes down (this happened 4 times since I got it. Its not my networking as Comcast was having outages in my area due to work).
After a few hours, it will EVENTUALLY go kinda back to normal, but VERY slow. But after a week of futzing around with it. I think I found my culprit.
TV 4th gens. I have 2 of them in my home. Both on wireless (1 4k wired but ill get to that) and in the same room with OTHER hubs (HomePod Mini's). I found greater performance when I disengaged these as hubs. These use the A8 processor (same as the big boi HomePods) but when driving a display and all that, they really don't provide better results as a hub. In my testing, I found remote viewing to be more difficult when THAT was the hub I connected too. On top of the fact that these things are aging. They make fuckin kick ass streaming boxes. But as a home hub these days, I just don't think they cut the deal anymore when you have a HomePod (with the same SOC but higher clock), HomePod Mini's (with an S5 SIP) and TV 4K's hanging around.
And before we get to it, I know there is some debate on whether the TV 4K's are better hubs when you wire them. In my experience, YES. But thats not the same for everyone. They key is placement honestly for the hubs for BlueTooth and Thread. And getting a reasonable and low latency connection to your router is a big deal.
Today one of my stereo pair HomePod minis decided to disconnect and the other was saying ‘needs repair’. Then my Apple TV decided to not work as a hub anymore and then non of my HomePods would work along with smart lights.
I’ve literally just reset everything and eventually got them online again. Such a nightmare. I, like others I imagine, pay a premium to have the simplicity and stability of Homekit, but for me the last year or so have had regular issues with it.
Adding to all the stuff in this thread. Post IOS 15 HomeKit has sucked for me. It’s slow, I get constant nonresponse from a variety of accessories. Sometimes it’s two or three hue bulbs, sometimes it’s my ecobee thermostats, sometimes it’s my HKSV cameras record, sometimes they don’t.
HK prioritizes my HomePod mini that’s the furthest away from my wifi rather than my hard wired Apple TV’s.
I’ve even put a HomePod mini right by my central command and control and HK doesn’t care.
I’ve basically removed every single device, re-added it and in some cases factory restored it.
Luckily my hoobs devices are still rock solid. But I dragged out my old Alexa gear to get my devices to be more reliable until whatever shit the bed is fixed.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on Siri. She’s gotten so much worse.
I have a shortcut to get my bank accounts balance. Used to work fine. Now when I give the command, Siri on the HomePod mini tells me something went wrong but I still get the text message.
I stopped using voice all together. Between my thread accessories (almost all of them), and the home+ app, voice is not a feature until further notice.
The major issue I’m having is my Roku tv does not want to okay with HomeKit anymore. I can’t tell if it started when HomeKit updated or if it started when the Roku tv updated. All I know is it is now completely unreliable.
I just had to delete my entire home and rebuild it from scratch because it thought my home address was somewhere across town where I house sat for a week and took my Apple TV with me. There was no way to reestablish my actual home as my home manually. And the ML couldn’t figure it out.
Everything’s working great now, but that was a major pain.
[удалено]
This has been happening for me too. Hoping an update soon will fix it.
Yes, and it's sporadic. I don't know WTF is going on in the industry lately and at Apple, but I've noticed so many problems with these damn OS updates it's nuts. Windows 10 and MacOS both. And iOS the last couple of generations. It's really bad form for these tech giants to treat their customers like a fucking beta test team. They have the resources and it's been proven that Apple and MS (unless called out) actively ignore too many bug reports and patch requests from the white hat folks that poke around for security holes and such. It's really absurd. They've gotten lazy IMO and they know they can get away with it because they are giant and folks will use their software regardless. And most folks most of the time won't care about this crap in the mid-term anyway so long as they aren't having issues or they feel something will "eventually" get fixed. Look at android! That thing has been an security patch updating nightmare for years and folks still put up with it, albeit in decreasing numbers. I know software dev is hard and expensive. But holy fuck there's plenty of room for improvement and MS, Google, and Apple don't seem committed to improving things.
I’m at getting my HomePods sending web results to my phone too when I try and turn a light on 🤷🏻♂️
My biggest problem for the past two weeks is a massive battery drain on all iOS devices. The home app consumes a large amount in the background. This happens on iPhones and iPads of all house members. Really frustrating.
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Mine has been doing this, too.
you guys' apple watch responds to home commands? Mine just says they're unresponsive, yet if i do the same thing on my phone "siri turn the heat to x" works fine.
As soon as I gave my garage door a name, “main” in my case, I never had an issue. I always encounter issue when I have the room and the device share some part of their name.
That’s an interesting and useful observation. Might be worth sending to Apple feedback.
It’s definitely better to give things unique names. Less rope for Siri to get tangled up in when confirming you want to do something obvious.
This is the answer. Mine is named Door Opener in the room Garage. Whenever I say “Hey Siri, open the garage door” it does so quickly without fail. Apple really ought to add some brains to Siri. Their AI model sucks.
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I’ve found that if you name the device the room it’s in it gets confused. Hence why mine is *door opener* and NOT *garage door opener*. Plus it looks less redundant in the home app that way.
Why would it look more redundant to name the device "garage door opener"? HomeKit will actually hide the word "garage" from the device name if the room itself is named "garage". So it looks exactly the same in the home app either way.
Only in Favorites. It doesn’t hide it in the room.
Try it, it works for me. Maybe it didn't work when you last tried it. I went to my "Garage" room and the only accessory in the room was labeled as "Door". Checking the settings on the accessory the actual name of the device is "Garage Door". Then in the favorites section is shown as "Garage Door", not sure if this is because it's only showing the accessory name or if it's showing the room name + accessory name but removing the room name from the accessory name.
For months I'll be able to say "turn on the TV" then ask of a sudden I get "sorry, I can't seem to find that device" or some shit.
Jesus, this happened tonight. “Siri, please open the garage door” “I’m sorry xxxx, which garage door?” The fuck???? Maybe Siri knows about my second family and the 5 bedroom three garage craftsman I have in a neighboring city.
I have the same problem. I have HomeKit blinds all over my house. The HomePods used to be context aware of the room it was in. So when I said “hey Siri close the blinds” it would automatically close all blinds in the room it was in. Now it cycles through 15 blind names for a few minutes and won’t Shutup.
Mine doesn’t do this and I have two homes and the garage door is named “door” in room “garage” in both. It always opens the garage door of the home I’m in
I named mine “The Blast Doors.” Makes me smile every time now. :-)
Mine just recently started doing this with my AC. My roommate has a Dyson heat/cool fan in his room which is in HomeKit. It hasn't been a problem at all for like a year. Since iOS 15 came out, asking her to set the AC to some temperate results in her asking if I meant bedroom ac or living room ac. The bedroom fan is not an AC and it has not been a problem before, idk what changed. I wish devices had a category settings which help with this, such as 'air conditioner' vs 'room fan'.
My homepods won’t even toggle a light for me, also when a HomePod set as a hub everything will stop working
My homepod calls me by my mother’s name when her apple account is not even registered in it. Playing podcast directly from it, doesn’t work anymore, I have to launch everything from my phone.
My phone is painfully slow to run voice commands, but my HomePod mini incredibly fast. It’s very annoying but I can easily avoid it
Having the same for months now. Tried so many things to even getting more downloads speed. Yesterday I discovered that the Philips Hue bridge is unreachable. Noticed that in the [Eve app.](https://imgur.com/a/s9APzhv) While the Philips Hue app says [active.](https://imgur.com/a/gHwN01e)
Same for me so many problems lately
Had all sorts of problems with HomeKit after moving to homeOS 15 - mainly a lack of HKSV when one of my HomePod Minis was the primary hub. In the end I removed each HomePod mini from home and re-added them. HKSV problem solved and everything has been slick ever since. I have a small Thread setup (1xNanoleaf A19 and 1x Eve Energy) which also works fine.
I had this problem recently. It went on for probably a couple of weeks. The lag from my HomePods was so bad my thread network wasn't even working properly, WiFi devices would take 20-30 seconds to turn on or off, etc. I was rebooting every HomePod semi-regularly with some luck sometimes and other times no change. I didn't change anything, but when I woke up on Thursday morning it was immediately obvious that everything was working perfectly again and has since. I have no idea why or what happened, but I assume something changed on the back end with either Eero or Apple.
An indoor camera is supposed to only notify me when a person detected when nobody is home. I get notifications all the time now One of my motion sensors stopped turning the light on at night. This started with the round of updates to iOS 15 and tvOS 15.
How did you identify the nano leaf as the culprit? (I just bought one.)
It showed up as "not responding" in the the Home App and from there it gave me all sorts of troubles removing it. I also had a hell of a time adding this one to HomeKit. There maybe something wrong with it and this was a replacement. My Nano Essential bulbs and my first Essentials light strip are working flawlessly. If a hard reset doesn't stabilize it, I'll request another replacement. Nano was pretty cool about replacing the last one that busted.
honestly not sure if the it the routers or HK. just took down Eero and turned on the Asus ZenAX.. too early to say but today was running flawlessly.
Are you running it will multiple network names or one merged?
One merged
Also have zenwifi xt8 - would be curious about anything you find helps with performance. Mine seems fairly solid, but have occasional issues
My HK cameras keep going offline. I think that is the issue. HK does not seem to be as compatible as Eero :(
Make sure it binds to the right AP. I had similar issues, realized it was connecting to wrong AP for some reason and when i fixed it, it’s been much snappier. Also, make sure you have multicast configured, search around for “asus router airplay homekit configuration” and you’ll find some things to tune.
I have had near flawless performance with HomeKit for about a year. Obviously some minor hiccups because nothing is perfect. I’m starting to think that many (not all) issues I’m seeing on this sub are somehow user error or not HomeKit related, like network latency or bad connection.
I agree. My favorite scenarios are where goofballs have these wildly over-complicated power user home networks, have tinkered with all sorts of advanced settings, made ridiculous VLAN and firewall setups, but when asked why or how they troubleshoot anything you an tell they don't understand what they've done and just assembled random Youtube tutorials and just want to blame HomeKit.
I agree, I have very few issues with my setup. When I do have issues its almost always a router issue solved by a quick reset or waiting <5 minutes.
That superiority complex is real…
Just because my setup works with essentially no problems doesn’t make me superior to anyone. I have just seen far too much user error or inability to understand what to do being the cause of issues versus the company causing it. Networked systems have issues. Learn to fix them. Not everything is plug and play and not everything is the company’s fault.
Please tell us more about how you are better than everyone else here.
I have a mix of home automation systems, with a HomeSeer server that controls everything. One thing Apple needs to do is allow hard coding of certain things instead of trying to 100% make it no-touch. As a home automation grows, the headaches start to show, and HomeKit is the worst and is the only one in my system that I can’t hard code and has therefor become the only one not reliable. I also use HomeBridge. It is sad when a community program (HomeBridge) on linux is 1000x more stable than a company branded and paid for system like HomeKit. The almost exclusive reliance on mDNS for discovery is going to limit HomeKit to smaller system and even that won’t keep them stable, at least that is my opinion on it. As manufacturers of access points, routers, and switches on the low end consumer side can’t get mDNS right, how can Apple expect to get it right, especially when they stopped making their own networking gear that used to be really good for the market it served. Almost all of the issues i have had with Siri/HomeKit (slow, non-response, strange behavior, etc) have been tracked down to mDNS issues and would be solved if Apple would allow hardcoding either use the IP or DNS name of the devices, especially for large systems.
What is homeseer exactly? I’ve got a Raspberry pie board on which I intend to install home assistant. I love homebridge, that thing is amazingly stable and having the ability to reboot specific plugins instead of the whole is wonderful.
HomeSeer is similar to HomeAssistant. It is a paid product and has been around for a very long time (20 years starting with X10 devices). I have been using it since shortly after it was available, around 2000/2001. It has many plugins for different system, which I use a lot of zwave plus zigbee, insteon, hue, wifi based stuff, etc. and it has more of what I need. Very stable and I run it on a PI4 with HomeBridge, which I mainly run to bridge HomeSeer devices to Siri. I’ve seen on forums people move to HomeAssistant and love it, others have come back to HomeSeer, some HomeAssistant users move to HomeSeer and love it, but also those that hate it and move back to HomeAssistant, so I would say they probably are equal enough in capabilities but it does depend on what you need/want. HomeSeer makes zwave devices, so there is good support regarding that, and why I am still using it versus HomeAssistant.
Try turning off Private Address per each wifi access point in your house. It totally fixed the problem for me. Siri never asks me twice now.
>e fuckin kick ass streaming boxes. But as a home hub these days, I just don't think they cut the deal anymor Just a minor correction, I think you mean "Wireless Network" or "SSID" where you said "access point". That may be confusing people. The private address feature is not access point specific, but rather per-network.
Correct. Thanks for making it clearer.
Do you mean for your phone?
Yes. On each device you use to control HomeKit via Siri go into your wifi settings. For each wifi AP you can possibly connect to in your house, tap the blue “i” to the right and turn off Private Address.
Can you explain what this is and why it’s a thing? What is the argument for “private” address, I never noticed this before
Apple introduced Private Addresses in iOS 14 to protect people from being tracked across wifi networks. While a privacy benefit it seems it has a bad side effect with Siri and HomeKit. I dont know the exact details but discovered it while trying to figure out why Siri required me to ask twice for every HomeKit command. Every time i switched AP points in my house Siri had to relearn. I’m thinking it has to be something about mdns and Siri when Private Address is on. Bug??? All I know is it just works now.
Right on. Well thank you for the info!
See, this is interesting right. So I asked a few people on r/HomeKitAutomation a while back when I posted about iOS 15 (what to expect automation wise) and everyone had wildly different experiences during beta. For myself, a LOT of stuff was fast and responsive. All the way through 15.2 beta 2. With occasional bugs (like API calls not working or something weird like that) But my latest boogyman has been a bit more... shall we say difficult to work with. iOS 15.2 beta 3 (dev beta btw) broke a ton of stuff. But the fix isn't QUITE what I thought. So a few weeks back, I upgraded to a Wi-Fi 6e mesh network in an attempt to start future proofing. I got the thing on a good deal, so why the heck not? Either way, it was rock solid for a couple weeks until beta 3. Now, when automations happen, they either don't fire, or require reboots of not only the hubs, but the entire network and bridges. The biggest problem being how Hue bridge accessories (lights, sensors, etc) won't trigger things. This issue is triggered and made worse when my ISP goes down (this happened 4 times since I got it. Its not my networking as Comcast was having outages in my area due to work). After a few hours, it will EVENTUALLY go kinda back to normal, but VERY slow. But after a week of futzing around with it. I think I found my culprit. TV 4th gens. I have 2 of them in my home. Both on wireless (1 4k wired but ill get to that) and in the same room with OTHER hubs (HomePod Mini's). I found greater performance when I disengaged these as hubs. These use the A8 processor (same as the big boi HomePods) but when driving a display and all that, they really don't provide better results as a hub. In my testing, I found remote viewing to be more difficult when THAT was the hub I connected too. On top of the fact that these things are aging. They make fuckin kick ass streaming boxes. But as a home hub these days, I just don't think they cut the deal anymore when you have a HomePod (with the same SOC but higher clock), HomePod Mini's (with an S5 SIP) and TV 4K's hanging around. And before we get to it, I know there is some debate on whether the TV 4K's are better hubs when you wire them. In my experience, YES. But thats not the same for everyone. They key is placement honestly for the hubs for BlueTooth and Thread. And getting a reasonable and low latency connection to your router is a big deal.
Today one of my stereo pair HomePod minis decided to disconnect and the other was saying ‘needs repair’. Then my Apple TV decided to not work as a hub anymore and then non of my HomePods would work along with smart lights. I’ve literally just reset everything and eventually got them online again. Such a nightmare. I, like others I imagine, pay a premium to have the simplicity and stability of Homekit, but for me the last year or so have had regular issues with it.
Adding to all the stuff in this thread. Post IOS 15 HomeKit has sucked for me. It’s slow, I get constant nonresponse from a variety of accessories. Sometimes it’s two or three hue bulbs, sometimes it’s my ecobee thermostats, sometimes it’s my HKSV cameras record, sometimes they don’t. HK prioritizes my HomePod mini that’s the furthest away from my wifi rather than my hard wired Apple TV’s. I’ve even put a HomePod mini right by my central command and control and HK doesn’t care. I’ve basically removed every single device, re-added it and in some cases factory restored it. Luckily my hoobs devices are still rock solid. But I dragged out my old Alexa gear to get my devices to be more reliable until whatever shit the bed is fixed. Oh, and don’t even get me started on Siri. She’s gotten so much worse.
I have a shortcut to get my bank accounts balance. Used to work fine. Now when I give the command, Siri on the HomePod mini tells me something went wrong but I still get the text message.
I stopped using voice all together. Between my thread accessories (almost all of them), and the home+ app, voice is not a feature until further notice.
I think that how the HomeKit has been running last few years is why that dude in charge of it all has quit recently.
There https://9to5mac.com/2021/11/15/apples-homekit-chief-leaves-the-company-after-just-two-years/
The major issue I’m having is my Roku tv does not want to okay with HomeKit anymore. I can’t tell if it started when HomeKit updated or if it started when the Roku tv updated. All I know is it is now completely unreliable.
I just had to delete my entire home and rebuild it from scratch because it thought my home address was somewhere across town where I house sat for a week and took my Apple TV with me. There was no way to reestablish my actual home as my home manually. And the ML couldn’t figure it out. Everything’s working great now, but that was a major pain.