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

[robbietop]

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.

Yeah, and they're pushing autotuned garbage or "Mahhh lady cheated on me with my cuzzzin so I slept with a donkeyyyyy, gotta get in mahhhh truck and sleep with a confederate blanket....." or "Yo, you best stop hating on me because I am lyrically fine and can't be STAAAHHHHHPPPDDDD so I might bust a cap" or "I am a blonde bimbo who dumps men after a few weeks, which is the definition of my last name!" or "DEMONS SWIRL INSIDE ME BECAUSE MY MOM NEVER BOUGHT ME POKEMON YELLOWWWWWWWWWW"

 

[twistedpixel8]

I'm glad I waited then, I've got several HomePods, Hue lights, Eve outlets and a Logitech doorbell. I'll wait until the general consensus deems it ready.

On a somewhat related note, Siri does seem to have gotten dumber, simple commands like "Turn off the dresser light" turns off the whole room....

Siri is absolute garbage. I was in the car earlier and I said “directions to Tesco on [specific street name].” Now this should be the simplest of commands for any assistant. She returns 7 results, the top 3 aren’t even in the same city. I’m not joking, one of them was 300 miles away. The result I wanted was 4th on the list.

Apple are a Chinese knock-off of themselves these days.

 

[sos47]

3…2…1
and you cant go back
awesome

 

[flexwithmarius]

It seems that 95% of the problems are from the HomePod and access control.

I’m not sure what Apple got horribly wrong with HomePod but its ability to network with HomeKit is awful.

Access control in this case is referring to home hubs as well as user management, not necessarily door locks themselves.

 

[Hergesheimer]

Apple please finally fix the HomePod music playback! I have two stereo pairs and not a single listening sessions goes smoothly.

One speaker is off, or no music at all, they stop playing and I have to pair them again or reset them to the factory factory settings.

And please give us a completely NEW music app for iOS and macOS! Speaking of the music app, the playback is (again) not gapless anymore since the latest update! Annoying!

 

[zorinlynx]

I'm surprised that if there are so many problems, that Apple hasn't rolled everyone back to the old code.

 

[Madmic23]

I’ve tried HomeKit, Alexa, and Google Assistant for home automation. Out of all three, I prefer Apple’s Home App for organizing devices and creating automations and schedules. I find the Alexa app to have a confusing layout, and Google Assistant hasn’t been responding to requests on a consistent basis.

Does anyone else prefer Alexa over HomeKit?

 

[Bazooka-joe]

This issue is very much Apple of late. How the hell did this get past the testing with so many bugs and yet it was signed off as being fit for purpose. Their software has serious quality control issues

 

[siddavis]

MobileMe worked poorly for everyone equally. The HomeKit upgrade has worked flawlessly for many.

Stop excusing this horrible rollout.
What’s worse, when you call support, they have no clue how to handle any of it. They act surprised.

 

[siddavis]

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.

They won’t. They’re probably busy now getting the fancy keynote videos ready for WWDC to demo all the great features that either won’t be released or won’t work properly for the public (actually beta) release. But damn, those videos will be amazing.
Yearly release requirement is devastating to quality.

 

[siddavis]

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.

Bingo. Yet they are losing people like my wife who has had to deal with Home nonsense and losing over 200 contacts after updating to 16.2. She said, “I thought that’s why we spent extra money. So that it would work!” She’ll look at alternatives next time.

 

[siddavis]

Siri is absolute garbage. I was in the car earlier and I said “directions to Tesco on [specific street name].” Now this should be the simplest of commands for any assistant. She returns 7 results, the top 3 aren’t even in the same city. I’m not joking, one of them was 300 miles away. The result I wanted was 4th on the list.

Apple are a Chinese knock-off of themselves these days.

I was driving today and sent an important message using CarPlay and voice to text. Or so I thought. Siri told me it was sent. I found out hours later it was not when I never got an answer to my question. My last week with Apple products and Apple support has been nothing short of horrendous.

 

[Surf Monkey]

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!

Several?

My HomeKit setup has over 85 devices and a couple dozen automations driving them. The new architecture has broken a bunch of critical things for me.

 

[Wxchaser]

Several?

My HomeKit setup has over 85 devices and a couple dozen automations driving them. The new architecture has broken a bunch of critical things for me.

Do you mind listing some of the critical items it affected?

 

[thejadedmonkey]

MobileMe worked poorly for everyone equally. The HomeKit upgrade has worked flawlessly for many.

Which is possibly even worse. At least with MobileMe, there was the hope that if you could fix something, it would be fixed for everyone. Here, it's obvious that different home configurations are causing issues, so what fixes a problem for one person might not work for someone else. That's going to make fixing this, incredibly difficult. I don't envy the engineers working on this.

 

[dwaite]

It’s been just awful since the update. HomePods don’t work, or are in and out, timers don’t work, AirPlay sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. Siri more useless than ever. I’m just ignoring them until this is fixed.

Most of those sound unrelated, however.

 

[bgiuriceo]

No issues here but maybe it's because I stayed on the beta path for my gear in anticipation of Matter and was trying to stay ahead of the curve:
1 AppleTV 4K latest
2 AppleTV 4K
1 HomePod Mini (self assigned as master)
1 Level lock
Ecobee Thermo
Lutron Caseta
...more
HOOBs on a RPI4B+ creating multiple Homekit bridges including UniFi Protect video cameras, TPLink, Broadlink, Nest, MyQ, Samsung TIZEN TVs, etc).

It all works with no issues but no apparent speed or performance upgrades. What IS really annoying is that you can't create a one-shot automation (an event on a certain date) in the Home app. I have to use the EVE app to create these events...insane.

Apple can own this space (and probably buy a few players for lunch money)...instead it feels like it's just another hobby. I wonder how much remote work has contributed to this poor QC.

 

[dwaite]

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…

There is this support article - did you make sure they don't have an empty home on their devices?

You can always call Apple Support. I recommend that before recreating your home, if you have more than say 10 accessories.

If you can't access a home or accept an invitation in the Home app

If you can no longer connect to a home, or receive or accept a home invitation, here’s what to do.

support.apple.com

 

[dwaite]

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.

This hasn't been my experience, as someone who has had support issues escalated to engineering (and even had product returns routed to engineering for further investigation).

The inter-team communication is more mailbox-based, so they can't put you on hold and see if anyone on that team is still at the spaceship in Cupertino. Kinda what you would expect for a large international company.

That said, you can hit the end of a script with no escalation. I've seen that a bunch with say battery performance issues, and in those cases I'm sure it was totally on purpose.

 

[brian3uk]

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?

Sending feedback during the short dev/public beta period rarely results in corrections before release unless it’s a major developer sending them. I have tickets open since iOS 12 that still happen in 16. The bug is somewhat uncommon, but once it starts it’s persistent and restoring won’t even fix it.

 

[dwaite]

It seems that 95% of the problems are from the HomePod and access control.

I’m not sure what Apple got horribly wrong with HomePod but its ability to network with HomeKit is awful.

Access control in this case is referring to home hubs as well as user management, not necessarily door locks themselves.

I believe the primary issue is with multi-home setups, more specifically I've seen a lot of mentions of issues when someone has more than one home and wants to invite other people, or they invite someone who has more than one home.

The secondary issue is that it wants to be an all-or-nothing upgrade across all of your homes.

Combined they are a disaster. For example, I wan't able to invite relatives over the holiday, and I suspect it is because their home is both the old architecture and a dumpster fire (tons of no response accessories, probably unplugged and forgotten).

Third issue is so common with Apple that it is hardly worth mentioning - the other side of "it just works", where failing setups have no user diagnosis or troubleshooting that can be used to fix something. I just saw "pending invitations", while my family members saw absolutely nothing.

 

[atomic.flip]

Just for perspective I run an almost entirely automated home / office. Over 100 connected peripherals and growing. I run an automation and device data translation server that allows HomeKit and non-HomeKit enabled devices to coexist and register in both Google and Apple’s home instances.

So I run the assistants in parallel and use them interchangeably to control and monitor the same peripherals. (Though being that iOS is my primary and preferred mobile interface I put more demand on HomeKit for most configurations and automations and leave Google as a backup when HomeKit fails.

Been testing these platforms extensively for years now…

Google’s home app and assistant is generally more reliable than Apple for executing operations.


Among the many issues reported by others here the new home app architecture is simply not faster by any appreciable margin. It’s ever so slightly more responsive in very very limited circumstances. But it’s become a veritable cluster fhfjthfb of new problems. Like changing the location of devices registered in the home sometimes just doesn’t take. I.E. you change what room an accessory is located in and the change reverts back to what it was previously over and over and over again. This at first appears like a UI bug but it appears to be some sort of database issue. The changes get queued and then a batch process posts the changes after they’ve been logged by the app.

Problem with this is the app UI immediately queries the current state of the home database which shows not what the user has selected and saved in the UI but rather the state prior to the user input. This results in users needlessly submitting multiple change requests to the queue and then the batch jobs crash and require an app restart to fix it.

It can also result in corrupt data.

In principal the concept of making batch jobs to post changes to the database is sound but the implementation is currently garbage resulting in the cascade of failures in user experience and data integrity.

It needs another redesign. I don’t think batch jobs are going to be a solution that is long term viable due to the performance of the database itself.

Yeah. The whole system needs a serious rework.

 

[WannaGoMac]

My 2 smart lightbulbs worked perfectly and flawlessly on iOS 15. Since iOS 16, they turn off and on randomly, and my measly 5 automation are not reliable.

In the middle of the night, the lightbulbs will just turn on. I also noticed a couple times where the Apple TV will pause what I’m watching and the light turns off.

I have deleted all automations and re-done them multiple times, and logged in and out of my iCloud account on my apple tv. If there was anyway I could go back to iOS 15 I would.

 

[Samuel Sosa]

Got a Google nest hub for Christmas so far no problem 😂 So fed up with HomeKit and Siri. I want it to work I really do but Apple has been slacking with it

 

[spunkybart]

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.

One of the biggest things for me is that I see fixed bugs reappearing in a later release - almost as if their code branching strategy is broken