Apple Adds iOS 16.2's Home App Upgrade to Internal List of Major Issues

[twistedpixel8]

Were any of these issues flagged by beta testers? Surely Apple's internal team and the beta testers would have flagged this so the architecture update could be pulled before the RC?

This baffles me as well. I know beta testers were reporting that 16.2 was NOT ready for release and lots of stuff was still broken (and they were reporting the issues) so Apple knew it was half-baked and released it anyway.

This stinks of poor management. I hope it leads to a shake-up in the Home team and we end up with a much better system for it.

 

[kylew1212]

I was able to upgrade my home. Since I’ve encountered multiple issues where before it was working great.

Location based automations haven’t worked since upgrade.

Home invites were wrecked but eventually worked.

 

[ryeclift]

I was able to upgrade my home. Since I’ve encountered multiple issues where before it was working great.

Location based automations haven’t worked since upgrade.

Home invites were wrecked but eventually worked.

Im having the exact same experience.

 

[dreinidaho]

My favorite is how when I say "Hey Siri, play music in the Kitchen" or "Hey Siri, intercom xxx's room" and it plays music and intercoms a completely random room that is not the intended room! It's a feature, not a bug!

 

[NightFlight]

Can we please add Siri to this list as well as autocorrect? 🤣

 

[TwoBytes]

funnily enough, 16.2 fixed a lot of homekit issues for me- it's been flawlessly smooth and even allowed me to add some IKEA switches that were not working before.

 

[w5jck]

It's unclear when Apple will fix the issues...

Best guess, when hell freezes over... The Apple developers can't program much of anything these days.

 

[christian.terra]

The upgrade part of mine worked flawlessly.

Unfortunately I live with my family and I haven’t been able to properly add them back to the home. I’ve tried everything I could find online (reboot all hubs, turn off all hubs but one, wait, rename home, wait some more, chant “Steve” seven times etc) with the exception of deleting my home and starting from scratch.

I’d hoped for a better solution than that last one, but I’m almost to that point…

I had the issue with adding family members. the problem for me was that home app was sending the invite from my icloud email even though my appleID is not my icloud email. I added my icloud email to the contacts of those who i was inviting and it seemed to have fixed the issue for me.

 

[daved2424]

Why put any effort to making your software solid and reliable when you have 4 different models of iPhones and 600 iPad configurations? Just maintaining the Excel spreadsheet of those devices must take up most of their time!

 

[Rigby]

The only problem I noticed is that a time-based automation no longer works. Annoying, but apart from that the new architecture is a big improvement on my setup. Devices update much faster now and everything is more responsive.

 

[TonyC28]

Does this mean they’re going to finally take Home seriously? I doubt it.

 

[goonie4life9]

This baffles me as well. I know beta testers were reporting that 16.2 was NOT ready for release and lots of stuff was still broken (and they were reporting the issues) so Apple knew it was half-baked and released it anyway.

This stinks of poor management. I hope it leads to a shake-up in the Home team and we end up with a much better system for it.

Apple’s obsession with secrecy above all else prevents most inter-team communication. For example, this secrecy obsession has hindered the support process, to the point now that all Apple Support can do is offer: erase and reinstall then RTA to Engineering, so Engineering can say to keep your device up to date. No real information is gathered about the cause of the issue, because that could let some secret out.

 

[Criss P.]

After a month i upgraded to the new architecture, things are beginning to work. I had to delete and add again every single smart device, automations and scenes. For instance. I had issues with Siri not recognizing simple tasks like: "Turn (husband name) night lamp" [that lamp's name is literally "(husband name) night lamp"] the response from Siri was: "Sorry I couldn't find a shortcut for that"...

 

[tolsen718]

The database of issues should be public. What are you hiding Apple?

 

[PsykX]

Yup, it's the MobileMe of home upgrades.

It's that bad.

The entire Cloud business at Apple still feels somewhat like MobileMe.

Jobs would be mad at all the bugs in Apple products nowadays. His motto "It just works" has been buried with him.

 

[poematik13]

apple software is such garbage lately

 

[fatTribble]

I’m one of the lucky ones. I upgraded right away with no issues. I have mostly Hue lights and a couple of Eve outlets. My 4 HomePods are still going strong along with a number of Apple TVs. Hopefully they’ll get these issues fixed soon and it will be better for everyone. I agree with a lot of previous posts that we need some feature upgrades and bug fixes around the Home app, Control Center and Siri.

 

[TinyMito]

One of the issue I experienced is the automation breaks if I add or remove a device. It no longer triggers the automation anymore. I had to delete and redo the entire automation.

This issue particular on "Leaving Home" or "Arriving Home" automation.

 

[name99]

Something is broken re: Apple software development. I do not know how they architect/manage their different systems, but it appears to be broken (e.g. my experience of ever more bugs affecting MacOS releases). Not sure Apple mgmt cares since little seems to change.

Apple SW is very big consisting of many departments run in very different ways. Unfortunately it's the worst departments (and HomeKit does appear to be the worst of the worst) that get all the attention. We never have much reason to notice or complain about the departments that mostly do their well every year.

For example tools mostly just works; yes we can complain about many aspects of XCode, but in terms of functionality it just works, and things get fixed rapidly.
Same with the core OS. That's being changed much faster than people realize, but it just keeps going with few bugs ever affecting most users.
Even simple tools keep being fixed -- when I installed the most recent version of Mathematica, the installation was like 10x faster than in the past because a variety of SW related to mounting a very large disk image, then scanning/decompressing/decrypting/validating it was all now optimized to use all my cores, not the previous situation where just one or two cores were used.

Generally
- different departments have a few bugs every year, but those are fixed soon, and it's different each year BUT
- some departments just suck year after year after year. HomeKit was the worst. Shortcuts was second. Apple Music probably third. Everyone else is doing OK, at least not bad enough to make a permanent impression on my radar.

 

[name99]

One of the issue I experienced is the automation breaks if I add or remove a device. It no longer triggers the automation anymore. I had to delete and redo the entire automation.

This issue particular on "Leaving Home" or "Arriving Home" automation.

Yeah, location tracking by HomeKit is a PoS.

Much of this is due to limitations in Location Services that should be fixed; but it's HomeKit's fault that they didn't work with Location Services years ago to deal with the specific issues of "have I left/arrived at home" that are different from any other location. These issues include
- address changes.
- mismatch between address and actual geo-location
- we want fine grained tracking to be sure we are *in* the home (probably best down by BT)
- there are a different set of security concerns (don't allow someone else to fake things) in a way that's not true for knowing if I am close to the grocery store

 

[digduggler]

Things have actually been snappier after the update for me. The update was a problem - everyone in my home lost access. I had to remove/reinvite and those all got hung until I unplugged every hub in the house (which can be a lot when you’re in the ecosphere) to get the invitations back. Then it was smooth sailing. And I only figured that out because of google and being tech savvy. I wondered what your average user was supposed to do.

 

[CraigB1960]

I guess im one of the lucky ones who hasn't had any issues with the homekit upgrade and I have several devices in my home app. Fingers crossed things stay working!

Me too. I have very many devices and in the past, Home app has been problematic. This update solved all the issues I have had.

 

[SomeFrenchDude]

For what it’s worth: after the architecture upgrade
- my cameras were not recording to secure video
- HomeKit was not detecting when I was leaving home
- I received no notification (although that’s probably because of the first two).

What fixed it was deleting my home (and the « default » home created on my girlfriend’s iPhone), plus resetting my apple tv.
It’s obviously a pain, but at least after starting from scratch everything worked fine (and even a bit faster).

To me it looks like the main issue is the code that migrates from the old architecture to the new one is very broken. It felt like I was still on the old architecture before resetting everything as the video previews were slow to show up but after everything was much snappier.
That would explain why some users who migrated but haven’t started from scratch (because it’s a pain the ass) are still seeing issues.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Before Update: "Hey Siri, turn on the Den." Den lights turn on, AppleTV turns on itself and TV.

After Update: "Hey Siri, turn on the Den." Randomly starts playing Billboard Top 20 rap songs I didn't know existed nor desire to listen to on my HomePod mini stereo pair. Lights remain off. I have to make a scene that turns on these lights because asking to turn them on individually is kinda backwards, ESPECIALLY SINCE THEY'RE GROUPED TOGETHER in the room called DEN.

What's funny is I haven't listened to anything popular in over 10 years, and rap is not even a genre I consider music and thus never listen to it. So, I am wondering why I lost light control but gained "Hey, maybe they wanna listen to something they never listen to? Let's shove Billboard at them!"

Which doesn't make any sense. What appears to be happening here is lazy development with no real focus. Design by committee!

"People wanna have music just shoved at them when they turn on lights! Here, watch Tom Hanks make another movie about an emotionally stunted man! Here's some more content!"

Also, what's up with not having the ability to granularly add Home devices into Control Center? Isn't that its name? I get myQ being lazy and breaking up with HomeKit, but I would like to add just my Den to Control Center, not a random collection of whatever it thinks I need. Is it my phone or the AI Siri Suggestion's phone because I'm starting to wonder if Apple is eventually just gonna rent me the phone like I rent an apartment.

Siri on all platforms seems to assume everything you say to it must have something to do with Apple Music, so if there’s any possible way it can interpret it that way it will.

And all the music services don’t care what you want. Just like the old radio stations their job is to push what the labels are paying them to push.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Something is broken re: Apple software development. I do not know how they architect/manage their different systems, but it appears to be broken (e.g. my experience of ever more bugs affecting MacOS releases). Not sure Apple mgmt cares since little seems to change.

At the top of this internal list it says:
1. Siri [wontfix]

This is why they spent all year working on dynamic island and stage manager. They don’t care about core functionality anymore. Marketing has taken over. If it doesn’t make a good 15 second commercial they don’t want it.