was it happen only when you left your house and on cellular data? Or even when u at home?
It wouldn't work when I was on cellular - essentially when not on the home network.
But - I fixed it!
Short explanation:
My Apple TV was in one distinct "home", whereas my lights were in another home ("barn"). I moved the AppleTV over to the "barn" home, and it became the home hub for those lights.
Longer explanation:
I have a slightly odd setup - I have two "homes" - "home" and "barn". They are distinct structures, so when I set homekit up originally, I created two homes. That way I could segment smart devices between the two structures. When I originally set this up, the AppleTV served as a home hub for both homes (since they are both on the same network, I have a fiber cable connecting the two and the same Wi-Fi SSID) and I could control everything remotely. (sure, I could have used different rooms)
After one of the OS upgrades (I think when homekit was updated to the new version), I was no longer able to control my "barn" away from the home network. I tried a lot of things, some not mentioned here, all to no avail. This is a big assumption, but it seems Apple made a change in how "homes" are managed or controlled - if an AppleTV wasn't in a home, it couldn't control those devices EVEN if it was on the same network.
After the new OSX (14) / iOS (17) / tvOS (17) releases I decided I was going to spend a bit of time trying to figure out if anything changed. It still seemed to be broken - but with some new/small UI tweaks to the various interfaces, it was apparent to me that the AppleTV was in "home" and that might have something to do with it. Sure enough, after moving it to "barn" it was then able to control the devices in the barn.
