Apple Preparing to Re-Release Revamped HomeKit Architecture That Was Removed From iOS 16.2

[BipedalOS]

I already done it the first time would I get another update when it’s out or is the new one just for people that didn’t do it

It probably won’t be a manual update like you had to do. I’m sure this will just be a code fix for you.

For the rest it’s a code fix and upgrade together.

 

[skiguy45]

But does it fix this???

 

[sos47]

maybe its not just an iOS 16.4 thing but more an update for the hubs (tvOS, homepod) or even iCloud.

the Homekit App on iPhones and iPads is a frontend for users and stores nothing itself?

 

[TonyC28]

We salute you, brave soul who dares to install this update. God speed.

 

[4k78]

Hopefully I can get my ecobee to work with HomeKit again.

 

[Razorpit]

Hopefully, no more Bugs and SIRI have been fixed. 😖🤞

Sadly I think we all know the answer to both questions. 😉

I hope Apple gets HomeKit right this time around. Thankfully I didn’t jump on the first release. Life’s too short to spend on trying to get Siri to turn off the lights at night.

 

[Reverend Billy]

Hopefully my eufy 2K indoor cameras will work again on my iPhone. Which is weird because they never stopped working on my Apple TV 4K and my Apple Watch SE.

That’s interesting. My eufy outdoor cameras work fine on my iPhone but not on Apple TV, 2 Macs, Apple Watch, or my iPad. Cameras used to work via HomeKit on everything.

 

[svish]

Hopefully all bugs are fixed.

 

[PetrosiliusZwackelmann]

I really don’t understand HomeKit. Super often the shortcuts app, Siri or the Home app on the watch tell me that my devices are not available. I have to use the Home app on the phone where it works without problems and all devices are available…

 

[Burger Thing]

Rock solid for me. Speak for yourself.

Let me guess, you run a highly complex system like one or two Homepod, an Apple TV, one motion sensor and a light switch? 😝

 

[MALmen]

If you delete your home and start over. Will it be on the new architecture?

 

[karranz]

Home and HomeKit are such a m**, I left them (to never como back) when lights went out in the bathroom while taking a bath, sensors didn't detect movement not even waving them hello at 1cm. It was just to risky to have something like that at home.

 

[unsertwegen]

HomeKit is truly GARBAGE. Sorry to say. I love most things Apple but for the love of god they need to seriously overhaul HomeKit. That in combination with Siri’s lack of skills just leave one with an overwhelming sense of insult. Especially given Google Assistant and Home ALWAYS work even when Siri and HomeKit fail.

The biggest joke is when Siri has issues contacting my devices or controlling them but going into the home app on an iOS device or a macOS computer allows full unimpeded control of the accessory.

Very shoddy behavior. Sigh.

Edit:
Just to be clear…. I run a very connected / automated home with well over 100 devices (lights, washer / dryer, fridge, doors, TVs, speakers, cameras and other accessories) persistently managed / connected, video surveillance etc. and the environment is jointly managed by both HomeKit and Google Home with a proxy/translation gateway to make non-HomeKit or HomeKit only devices cross communicate with Google / HomeKit.

It makes for a really interesting test environment to compare reliability and flexibility of both Apple and Google’s offerings.

Thanks for sharing! It sounds like you have a really interesting setup!

If you would be amenable, I (for one) would love to hear what you use as a proxy/translation gateway between HomeKit and non-HomeKit devices--and how you use it. (For example, I've heard of HomeBridge, but (a) I haven't used it and (b) I thought it was only good for surfacing non-HomeKit devices to HomeKit.)

 

[hagar]

I updated the architecture when it was available in December. But then deleted and recreated my Home due to (largely unrelated) issues.

I wonder if my current home now runs the old or new architecture.

 

[ninecows]

Home and HomeKit are such a m**, I left them (to never como back) when lights went out in the bathroom while taking a bath, sensors didn't detect movement not even waving them hello at 1cm. It was just to risky to have something like that at home.

Thats pretty common. The sensor probably have a minute or so after detecting “No movement” where it will not accept new inputs. Faulty design, when combined with the only available logic in Home/Homekit:

So you have the option to turn on light when detecting motion and turn it off after eg 10 minutes. At that point it will turn of no matter what it registers within the 10 minutes. So movement again in minute 5 after light has turned on, will not re-trigger another 10 minute count down. It will still turn off light 5 minute later.

You can also ask it to turn off when detecting "no movement". That is for most sensors a trigger that is send 1 minute after last movement detected. After that trigger message the sensor will go into a blind mode for a minute or so. So if you do not move for 1 minute and 5 seconds lights will be turned off and you will not be able to turn it off again until a minute later.

What they should implement is "when no movement has been detected for xx minutes". There's a logic for that in the aqara app (the sensors I use) that works rock solid, but that can only be combined with aqara LED lamps, which are not produced anymore.

I have seen various attempts to workaround on this with shortcuts. Looping through several rounds of wait and ask for motion detected and then exiting etc, but I cannot get anyone of them to work stable. Often I would find that the lights will not be turned off and burn all night.

Amazing that an old "dumb" PIR sensor can do this perfectly out of the box and has been so for +20 years. Two knobs: One for timing and one for sensitivity. Total blunder that Apple did not think of this.

Edit: Give apple some feedback here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/ ...not sure it will help, but it will not help if nobody gives feedback. And their feedback form only allow tvOS up to version 15.3... I'm pretty sure mine is higher ;-)

 

[rembert]

Unfortunately I also had the update installed, breaking geofencing when the Apple TV. Took me a while to discover it only broke down when the Apple TV was connected over WiFi. When connected to Ethernet it did work properly. Had a long chat with some Apple engineer about this (before the update was actually pulled).

I have turned off automatic updating on the Apple TV now and will only update when the weather outside is ok. My heating system is managed by HomeKit and with the roaring gas prices here in Europe that's not something to gamble with.

Luckily the bug cause the heating system not to turn oneven though someone was at home. That saved me enough money to buy the new Apple TV this spring.

 

[NightFox]

I wonder how much permanent damage Apple has done with this to the whole home automation scene? I guess most of us with Homekit-based HA setups accepted there would always be occasional glitches and knew that short server outages are a fact of life, but for your whole infrastructure to stop working for weeks? That's got to have been making people think twice. At least, hopefully with Thread/Matter this should become less of an issue, but it's going to be a few years before that's fully integrated into most people's set-ups.

I know not everyone's been impacted, but it seems that the more invested in HA you were, the more likely this HomeKit issue is to have affected you and other family members.

 

[cableguy84]

Home app needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, as does the music app

 

[koil]

It also seems to have broken the ability to access HomePod alarms/timers remotely...

I was at a conference recently and had to get my father to my apartment to pull the power on my bedroom HomePod mini to stop it from annoying my neighbours for the week because I wasn't able to disable the recurring alarm remotely...

The wording in the panel that shows the alarms says:

Alarms can be viewed and managed only when this HomePod is on the same network as this iPhone

This sounds intentional and really has me really worried that they knew and that this is now expected behaviour. I gotta tell you, alarms on my HomePod instantly became less useful...

On a side note, this is actually the only issue I've had after doing the architecture upgrade, but then I don't have any family sharing set up.

 

[NightFox]

I was an early adopter of the new Home Architecture (When 16.2 came out), and it just ruined my Home devices a lot. I think I still have it since I have a lot of problems despite it being removed.

Yes, you still have the new architecture. Even though Apple withdrew the option to upgrade to the new architecture, it didn't roll anything back for those who'd already installed it as it's not possible to do so.

 

[koil]

So you have the option to turn on light when detecting motion and turn it off after eg 10 minutes. At that point it will turn of no matter what it registers within the 10 minutes. So movement again in minute 5 after light has turned on, will not re-trigger another 10 minute count down. It will still turn off light 5 minute later.

Aha, that confirms what I thought I was experiencing. I figured 10 minutes should be enough that I shouldn't ever end up with lights off, but I do. Not often, but it happens.

Who came up with that logic?!?

 

[bydandie]

Great, so I now have to wait until 16.4 until I have a working HomeKit environment? Was rock solid for years until the update then no devices connect

 

[NightFox]

So you have the option to turn on light when detecting motion and turn it off after eg 10 minutes. At that point it will turn of no matter what it registers within the 10 minutes. So movement again in minute 5 after light has turned on, will not re-trigger another 10 minute count down. It will still turn off light 5 minute later.

I may have misunderstood this, or it might be device specific, but that's not my experience.

I have a Hue motion detector in my home office. In Home, I have automations set up so that if it detects movement, it will turn on my air purifier, and if it's after sunset, some lights. I have this automation set to turn off after 5 minutes.

Everything only turns off 5 minutes after I leave my office, other than that it will stay on for as long as I'm in the office. That suggests that whenever I move, the 'countdown clock' resets to 5 minutes, which doesn't seem to be what you're suggesting above?

I guess the behaviour may differ between different motion detectors. For example, some (typically in intruder alarm systems) will use battery-saving logic whereby if it detects motion, it won't 'look' again for another x minutes. If your 'off delay' was less than x minutes, you'd get the problem the OP mentioned.

 

[ninecows]

Aha, that confirms what I thought I was experiencing. I figured 10 minutes should be enough that I shouldn't ever end up with lights off, but I do. Not often, but it happens.

Who came up with that logic?!?

This is seriously not thought through as it is today.

I saw someone making two automations:

1. Turn on light when movement has been detected.
2. Turn ON light when NO MOVEMENT has been detected AND set this to turn off light after x minutes.

It sounds ingenious - it should catch it in a loop between automation 1 and 2 as long as you move within the x minute interval. But it seems like someone at apple has broken that option as well, because I cannot get it to work. Either lights will be turned off while you're still present or it will never go into #2 and lights will stay on forever. Maybe someone else can get it to work?

I also seen some lengthy shortcuts attempts. Here's one: https://patrikmojzis.medium.com/mot...-off-lights-after-a-certain-time-a9b616b719ae but it doesn't work stable either. It should in theory, but I think it depends on the sensors and that's again a lack of standards.

Finally - and this is the most ridiculous: I have a logic circle that also offers to double as movement sensor. I quickly learned that it would as expected turn on light when detecting motion. And when not detecting motion any more it will turn off ligths as expected... and then turn them back on because the image its seeing is changing because, well... it got darker in the room. Light on - lights off - lights on - lights off... 😂

 

[ninecows]

I may have misunderstood this, or it might be device specific, but that's not my experience.

I have a Hue motion detector in my home office. In Home, I have automations set up so that if it detects movement, it will turn on my air purifier, and if it's after sunset, some lights. I have this automation set to turn off after 5 minutes.

Everything only turns off 5 minutes after I leave my office, other than that it will stay on for as long as I'm in the office. That suggests that whenever I move, the 'countdown clock' resets to 5 minutes, which doesn't seem to be what you're suggesting above?

I guess the behaviour may differ between different motion detectors. For example, some (typically in intruder alarm systems) will use battery-saving logic whereby if it detects motion, it won't 'look' again for another x minutes. If your 'off delay' was less than x minutes, you'd get the problem the OP mentioned.

So this is lack of standards for these motion sensors that is "homekit" certified.
I think mine will maximum report back once per minute. I can get it to work in the aqara home app because it offers the more correct logic (turn off if no movement has been observed for xx minutes). The hue motion sensors might be working better and reporting every event?

It could also be how sensitive they are? Its not that I'm completely motionless for 5 minutes, but I might be standing still only moving my hands. That's also a lack of standards. At the very least you should be able to adjust sensitivity.

Talk about reverse-inventing the wheel... 😂

Edit: re-reading your message. The sensor will look no more often than once per minute. I can also see that in the logs of the sensor. Logs every whole minute. I set the off delay to 5 or 10 minutes, so that cannot be it...