Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Releases HomePod Software 17.4 With Music Preference Update
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Will it learn that I want to play BBC radio?
Apple today released new software for the HomePod and the HomePod mini, debuting HomePod Software 17.4. The update comes over a month after the last HomePod software release.
With HomePod Software 17.4, Siri is able to learn what a user's preferred media service is, eliminating the need to set a third-party app as the default or include an app name when asking Siri to play content.Apple has removed the Home app option that let users select a default media service as a result of the new feature addition. The change brings the HomePod in line with the iPhone and the iPad, which already offer the option to provide a default music service selection to Siri when making a song request for the first time.
Third-party apps that work directly with the HomePod include YouTube Music, Deezer, Pandora, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio. Streaming music services need to support HomePod for the feature to work, and not all do, such as Spotify. You can play Spotify content on the HomePod by asking Siri, but it routes the song through the iPhone to the HomePod over AirPlay.
Along with Siri support for a preferred music service, the HomePod 17.4 update also includes performance and stability improvements.
Article Link: Apple Releases HomePod Software 17.4 With Music Preference Update
Hmmm... seems that either Meross pushes firmware updates extremely late (if they do) or there's something weird with your wifi (IPv6 or multi-cast issues).
I use smart power plugs too. For fans, scooter charger and some special "dumb" lights. They're all from Eve and they are either bluetooth-only or Thread. In the house no plug has every failed, except the one that had Matter firmware installed. The bluetooth model has a bit slower response time, but that's all.
Well it was a good run with the OG HomePod but it seems it is now dead since 17.4 update. I tried unplugging it for an hour but it didn’t help. Will try have it disconnected until tonight. What is strange is that it did update to 17.4 last night so it has passed this step, atleast the home app says it is on 17.4. However i don’t remember actually interacting with it last night after the update so not entirely sure it was up and running.
Warning to the rest of you with OG HomePods.
Warning to the rest of you with OG HomePods.
Last edited:
Every time I turn on a lamp in the living room using HomeKit the AppleTV turns off. So dumb
I wish they brought back the ability to have Siri speak at a different volume from the music.
You used to be able to set Siri's responses to minimum while the music was set to normal volume.
Now Siri rattles the windows when she doesn't understand a request she's done 100 times before.
You used to be able to set Siri's responses to minimum while the music was set to normal volume.
Now Siri rattles the windows when she doesn't understand a request she's done 100 times before.
This is very, very common with our OG HomePods after updating to the latest version of the firmware. Usually points to a problem with the power source.
Some people have repaired them successfully, but it's one of the most hairy teardowns and fixes you can do.
Just a design flaw in the OGs. I still have a bunch of them in my house, and I cross my fingers every time I update.
To be fair, if somebody did some personal-rebellion/mild-fraud against Apple by finding a way to return an OG homepod in a new homepod's box, forcing Apple to take the design flaw on the chin... I wouldn't be the one pointing them out to LEOs.
HomeKit is brittle af if you have many devices.
I went through the trouble of assigning them all static ips, based on their MAC address. It's an ordeal takes all afternoon to track down and get right. The "Discovery" app in the Mac App Store is a huge help, so is arp -a on the command line, and even just hovering over your Airport (if you have Airports, otherwise you've probably got an even better wifi router interface) in the AirPort Utility to find clients and their dns names/MAC addresses.
I've got about 65 smart devices on my home wifi. About 25 of those were new after a big reno, where I just let them do DHCP. Everything was working like crap. To the point it was affecting my wifi network.
The amount of DNS/bonjour level noise and knock-on wifi and HK messaging noise generated by all these dynamic IPs is truly disruptive.
Especially considering a lot of smart devices don't provide a unique bonjour name, and when you have multiple the first to connect gets VenderCoDevice.local, while the second gets VendercoDevice-1.local, when the next time they renew things can work out where they swap. And now you're in error-correction hell, hoping the vendors do timely and intelligent error reporting/timeouts, and that this works well with the caching on your various HK hubs. And not to mention if you've got an appletv and a homepod in the same HomeKit Room, frequently their default naming will wind up competing for the same Roomname.local/Roomname-1.local name.
It's a nightmare. But it all goes away if you assign static IPs and where you can different network names (not always possible with all vendors).
Last weekend I tracked down all their MAC addresses and assigned static IPs and HK and my network are steady as a rock again.
You ABSOLUTELY should not need to do this.
You ABSOLUTELY need to do this if you want stability for a large number of HK wifi devices.
Last edited:
That was one issue with one cause, yes. But the only reason you're not aware of this happening randomly to some homepods on every firmware update... is because you haven't looked.
Best guess by folks who've done fixes and teardowns is that a little diode in the power supply can get shorted during update. Relatively uncommon, but consistently ocurring, and doesn't seem to be related to the firmware version of the update.
How do you handle smart devices that don’t have the ability to allow you to set a static IP on the device itself? Do you use DHCP with MAC address reservations to enforce the IP’s that your DHCP server hands out to them? I don’t see a way I can set a static IP on my smart plugs but I can certainly either do it at the router level or call my ISP and have them put the device into bridge mode and buy my own router.
I’ve been meaning to do that for a while and have always had my home network configured that way but I got sick and wound up spending a month in the hospital when we moved back in the summer of 2022 to our current place and when I finally got out and back home my wife had managed to get all of our smart devices and Apple TV’s working with the built in WiFi that’s a part of the router / firewall that they provided to us and it had a strong enough random password assigned plus auto-firmware updates so I just left it as it was then as I had way bigger fish to fry like physical therapy so I could get around on my own again without having to use a walker and getting healthy again so I didn’t need an organ transplant. LOL ….
Only way to do it is by reserving IPs for MAC addresses (macs/phones/tablets allow a DHCP ClientID which persists over phone/etc upgrades).
I've got my ISP's router in bridge mode. And my main Airport Extreme has all the DHCP reservations. The Airport is probably the least convenient router for doing this, but it works. Use those other tools I mentioned to find the MAC addresses.
It's a pain, but it will make your HK 100x more stable. If you've got a lot of wifi devices like me, it'll make your network more stable too.
An interim solution would be to crank your DHCP reservation leases as high as you're comfortable. Assuming you're not coming close to the 250ish devices coming onto your network in a week, there's no reason not to set it as high as a week on your home network. (A coffee shop may need to set it as low an an hour or so.) This will help for the devices that actually implement the lease timeouts correctly (which is no guarantee).
I’m versed enough in network scanning tools that finding the MAC addresses won’t be an issue. I use Windows at work and am a programmer with a pretty good background in networking so I’m familiar I with some nice free tools out there that will do a network scan across a given IP range, let you save it then do a subsequent scan and tell you if any previously detected devices are no longer using the IP they were previously so you just do your scan, unplug the device, scan again, find out which device is no longer being found, note it’s MAC then setup a DHCP reservation, turn it back on and scan again to make sure it’s pulling down the IP you’ve reserved for it then rinse, wash and repeat.
I’m not at all familiar with Bonjour and given what you’ve said it makes perfect sense why it’s such a cluster @#$% for all but the smallest networks with a minimal amount of devices. I don’t have some crazy network but between the smart plugs, the smart bulbs, the Apple TV’s, iPhones, iPads, my iMac, my MacBook Pro, my Apple Watch, my Vision Pro, printers, smart TV’s, gaming consoles etc. we’re probably talking 20 devices give or take a few.
I’ll give that a shot and get the ISP’s router put into bridge mode plugged into a good WiFi mesh router / firewall and we’ll go from there. Thanks again!!!!
Add the fact that multiple devices in your home can be your primary HK hub at any time (worsened with network issues), and my toes curl at the thought of trying to keep all the device ip/names in sync as they shift and shimmy around.
This is why I’ll take hardware bridges over individual WiFi connected devices!
I’m rock solid now with my 60+ IoT devices plus our Macs and phones and watches (and enough hue bulbs to need two bridges!).
My only remaining problem is somehow every week or two a half dozen hue bulbs I deleted from my HomeKit 2y ago (!!) keep reappearing in HK, causing Siri to complain that some devices didn’t respond. 🙄
I delete them again and wait for the zombies to come back. 🧟♂️ 🧟♂️
I’m not sure if it’s HK or Hue. But I’ve got so many bulbs and so many scenes, I REALLY don’t want to mess around trying to reset the bridges.
I would give my eye teeth for HomeKit to implement infrastructure as code.
There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to edit a config file and completely spool up our smart homes from scratch. Working with large and complex scenes has insanely poor UX.
Third party tools (Home+, HomeKitController) make this easier in some ways, but harder in others.
I’m toying with the idea of writing my own unpolished workbench app to handle this, but I’m short on the time.
Last edited:
The more you discuss it the more HomeKit seems like a real mess. The fact that you can’t even use the app to tell it which device you want to be the primary HomeKit hub is a joke at this point given how long it’s been out there now.
At a minimum let advanced users set a priority level for their HomeKit hubs so we specify which device we want as the primary hub and if it’s not available then let us specify which device we want to use as the next available backup and in what order.
Not only should you be able to set these defaults if you know what you’re doing but you should also have real time control over which device is currently the primary hub on the fly so you can do troubleshooting and testing if/when necessary if you want to in real time without literally having to disconnect the devices one by one until the one you want becomes the primary active hub. I’ve got certain devices where, for whatever reason, when they are hub HomeKit simply doesn’t seem to function as well and it’s not a WiFi range issue either so I’d love to be able to let the system know which should be the primary and which should be the failover hubs and in which order they failover.
Also check that on only having 20 devices. I just double checked the WiFi network and I’ve got closer to 30 right now that are on and pulling down an IP that I can all account for now that I’ve looked at the list and refreshed my memory. I totally forgot about things like the garage door openers, our thermostat, etc. Things that apps exist for that I don’t ever use or things like the smart thermostats that I’ve got pre-set so it’s basically a set it and forget it (unless it stops working) thing.
So it’s not as complex a home network as you have but it’s not just a few devices or even 10 to 20 either. Nothing so complex as it should give HomeKit fits but it’s obviously not architected in the proper manner. Apple should start there. Either fix that or start giving more advanced users some basic level of control staring which which device you want to be your current hub. I’d take something as simple as that over the current configuration where you’ve got no control and literally have to power off every device that can act as a hub one by one until only the one you want become the active hub and then turn them back on again. WTF???
Last edited:
Hmmm... HomeKit relies mainly on local IPv6. DHCP reservations (IPv4) won't make things better in my experience.
I found out myself a couple of years ago. One of the first HK devices I got was a wifi light strip from Eve. Every now and then it responded very slow or lost its connection. I did assign it to a fixed IPv4 address for a short while, but that didn't make any difference. I assumed for months that it was a firmware issue, but eventually while checking something else in the network I found that a faulty network switch was the cause of it all. It had the tendency to drop random IPv6 packets. Like I knew that the Airport Utility uses IPv6 local link for discovering, HomeKit also uses IPv6 on the local network to find and communicate between devices.
Proper IPv6 support, including IPv6 multicast, is kind of mandatory. Unfortunately many ISP's still provide customers with crappy DSL wifi home-routers that have almost no (local) IPv6 support. That's one of the reasons why some also have problems with AirPlay/AirTunes.
My current HomeKit consists of +100 devices: many of them connect via Thread, using 10 hub's (2x ATV, 8x HomePod). The other hub are HUE (with lots of switches and lights) and HomeBridge. Every device responds swiftly, only the ones that still use plain old Bluetooth sometimes take a couple of seconds more. HUE also responds quick, except when the hub is very busy with animated scenes. None of them have a DHCP reservation. Actually those devices that have a webinterface can be accessed by their mDNS hostname (.local) as it should.
I have replaced my network switch and wifi AP with professional models a couple of years ago and since then all these issues have gone. And while I don't have those inexplicable "not responding" issues anymore since, I do agree with @Macaholic868 that there should be an option to prioritise certain HomeKit hubs. I found that a wired ATV, when it is selected as the main hub, often makes HomeKit respond more consistent and faster than when the main hub is connected via wifi. That said, HomeKit setups that totally rely on wifi, like with HomePod's, these can be fast as well when the wifi network isn't bothered with heavy radio interferences from the neighbours wifi.