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Would really be great if somebody could explain in detail the ideal network setup that is required for HomeKit to function reliably. Or better yet, a technical explanation about what network issues cause HomeKit to fail and why. Seems like way too many people are having problems. (Myself, I am not seeing the issues, but that's not because of my fantastic network... it's thanks to fixes in 16.4 - and I only have an ATV hub, no HomePods.)

For me, assigning static IP addresses is not that big of a deal, but if we're working towards an ecosystem that "just works", then I don't see why it shouldn't be designed to "just work" equally well in a DHCP environment, which is what most folks are going to be dealing with out of the box anyway. (just think about why we have DHCP in the first place)

HomeKit should be robust enough to be able to handle the occasional network hiccup and various common configurations. Most people don't mess with, or don't want to mess with, or can't mess with, the default configuration settings of a router, modem, or whatever is supplied by their ISP.
 
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Is it just me or is bass more substantial on the new HomePods since HomePod Software 16.4.1? Maybe I’m imagining it.
 
All 4 of my HomePods reply with “I’m not connected to the internet” with 90%+ of any of my requests.

But then allows me to stream to it. I don’t understand what the issue is with these things.

Every other device in my house is fine over WiFi, I’m on a Wi-Fi 6 mesh’s and I’m a network engineer!
 
I have 2 Homepod Gen 2s paired in stereo. It's very buggy. Sometimes the volume only changes for one Homepod. Sometimes there is no sound coming from the other one.
 
Went into each device and switched to manual. Then designated each device to a different number (last 3 numbers) on the ip address. I honestly am not sure if that's how you do it so correct me if I made a mistake
I did it via my router admin page. I don’t think there’s another way to do it
 
I went to the HomePod os 16.4 beta to fix an issue I was having, but now even though I went back to stable builds on my phone, it still updates to the next beta only on my HomePods. kind of annoying, id like to be back on stable builds.
 
I doubt it, but I hope this fixes the playlist issue with HomePod. Whenever I ask Siri to play a playlist, she just says “I couldn’t find that playlist in your Apple music” no matter what I try or how many times I reset it.
This annoys me too. I have a work around though which may help you.

If I say Hey Siri play the ‘really cool’ playlist it will say “sorry I couldn’t find that playlist in your Apple Music” BUT if I say “Hey Siri, play one of my playlists” Siri willthen ask me which one, and if reply “really cool”it willthrn play my really cool playlist just fine.

This works as a workaround about 95% of the time.
Go figure!

I hope it helps you until this bug is fixed
 
If I say Hey Siri play the ‘really cool’ playlist it will say “sorry I couldn’t find that playlist in your Apple Music” BUT if I say “Hey Siri, play one of my playlists” Siri willthen ask me which one, and if reply “really cool”it willthrn play my really cool playlist just fine.

Wow. So Siri doesn't look in the most obvious place for a playlist, and then just gives up. That is some really crappy engineering on Apple's part.

This is very similar to how Siri works with Scenes. Some are just completely ignored in favor of looking for an accessory, even when you use the exact name of the Scene.

Exact name matching should be the easiest part of Siri... no AI required. 🤣
 
Went into each device and switched to manual. Then designated each device to a different number (last 3 numbers) on the ip address. I honestly am not sure if that's how you do it so correct me if I made a mistake
To see the benefits you have to assign static IPs to all the smart switches and lights and plugs etc. Everything you control with HomeKit.

It’s not a super easy job (not exactly hard), but it helps tremendously.
 
Would really be great if somebody could explain in detail the ideal network setup that is required for HomeKit to function reliably. Or better yet, a technical explanation about what network issues cause HomeKit to fail and why. Seems like way too many people are having problems. (Myself, I am not seeing the issues, but that's not because of my fantastic network... it's thanks to fixes in 16.4 - and I only have an ATV hub, no HomePods.)

For me, assigning static IP addresses is not that big of a deal, but if we're working towards an ecosystem that "just works", then I don't see why it shouldn't be designed to "just work" equally well in a DHCP environment, which is what most folks are going to be dealing with out of the box anyway. (just think about why we have DHCP in the first place)

HomeKit should be robust enough to be able to handle the occasional network hiccup and various common configurations. Most people don't mess with, or don't want to mess with, or can't mess with, the default configuration settings of a router, modem, or whatever is supplied by their ISP.
Assign a static IP to each smart thing on your network.

With dynamic IPs all the different devices are shifting and jumping around.

Each device that wants to control a HomeKit smart-device has to access the last cached IP of each device. When the IP shifts, it takes a little while for it to detect that there’s a problem, and why, and then search for the new ip of the device it’s trying to control.

It gets worse the more devices you have on your network and the more HomePods/Apple TVs/watches/phones that need to stay up to date with the current IP.

To assign a static IP of a smart switch/plug/whatever. You have to find it’s MAC address (usually listed on the device, often also found in the company’s app that manages that device).

Once you have the MAC address you map it to a static IP in your router (trivial to do in most routers, even Apple Airports).
 
Hoping it helps straighten out HomeKit architecture as iOS 16.4.1 didn't make much of a difference in performance issues for me..

Nope, still getting the "not responding" notification for smart devices in HomeKit.. I'd say Home may not be fixed until iOS17 at this rate which is ridiculous
Same thing for me. 16.4.1 hasn’t improve the situation at all. The HomePod remains a very terrible experience since the release of HomePod OS 16 in September 2022. It seems Apple is just unable to develop a smart speaker OS that is stable…
 
On my end HomePod OS 16.4.1 remains an extremely bad OS. Just today I restarted my HomePods at least four time and they randomly stopped playing music at the very least 15 times! OS 16 is just a big mistake that should have never been released and Apple just can’t fix it. They should give us the option to go back to OS 15.7 which was stable on my end. So sad that we don’t have Apple quality OS anymore!
 
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With dynamic IPs all the different devices are shifting and jumping around.

But is that really the case with DHCP? All devices? Multiple times per day?

If a home automation device is always on and connected, why exactly would its IP address be doing all this shifting and jumping around? Sure, IF your computer shuts down AND its DHCP lease expires AND iPhone later comes home and grabs that IP... but we're talking about automation devices that are always home and powered. Unless your Wifi is also being used by the Starbucks next door with lots of new devices coming/going, most of the time I would expect the same IP to get re-assigned when the lease expires. I know... no guarantee of same IP, but I wouldn't characterize the entire table as shifting and jumping around... routers do have some built-in caching.

DHCP is a very typical thing that non-tech, "it just works", kind of people use. If there are specific network conditions that must be met for Home Pods or HomeKit to function properly, then Apple needs to publish the guidelines. Whatever the case, when Home Pods that worked under 15.x are broken under 16.x, I am not so sure about blaming the network, when that's not what changed.

Anecdotally, when I was having my big HomeKit issues with 16.3.x for two months, I needed to reboot my router and hub once per day to keep HomeKit working properly. Thinking it was my 24-hour DHCP lease, I changed it to 48 hours and it made absolutely no difference. Then 16.4 was released and the issue immediately resolved itself.
 
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16.4.1 made one of my 2nd gen HomePod unable to connect to the wifi, while the other one connects just fine. I have reset all the possible settings that I could but the problem persists.
 
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But is that really the case with DHCP? All devices? Multiple times per day?

If a home automation device is always on and connected, why exactly would its IP address be doing all this shifting and jumping around? Sure, IF your computer shuts down AND its DHCP lease expires AND iPhone later comes home and grabs that IP... but we're talking about automation devices that are always home and powered. Unless your Wifi is also being used by the Starbucks next door with lots of new devices coming/going, most of the time I would expect the same IP to get re-assigned when the lease expires. I know... no guarantee of same IP, but I wouldn't characterize the entire table as shifting and jumping around... routers do have some built-in caching.

DHCP is a very typical thing that non-tech, "it just works", kind of people use. If there are specific network conditions that must be met for Home Pods or HomeKit to function properly, then Apple needs to publish the guidelines. Whatever the case, when Home Pods that worked under 15.x are broken under 16.x, I am not so sure about blaming the network, when that's not what changed.

Anecdotally, when I was having my big HomeKit issues with 16.3.x for two months, I needed to reboot my router and hub once per day to keep HomeKit working properly. Thinking it was my 24-hour DHCP lease, I changed it to 48 hours and it made absolutely no difference. Then 16.4 was released and the issue immediately resolved itself.

Try it yourself. Write down all the IPs of your HK devices, then check them a week later.

There’s more IP hopping than you think.

Any time your router or even one of your wifi access points restarts/hangs it can cause one (or many devices) to shift.

And you have no idea how often some rando-smart-thing decides it needs to reboot.

If you have multiple wifi access points (in a mesh config or not), devices will change IPs even more frequently as they swap back and forth between APs due to a whole host of internal and external network conditions.

Add to that the fact that every piece of software/firmware on your router to your HK bridges, to your individual HK devices will have a different set of IP caching logic. So every one of them will invalidate and renew differently.

Maybe one link in your chain checks its cache infrequently.

Maybe another checks only that the device is still responding, but doesn’t check that it’s still the smart outlet and not your smart oven.

Maybe another checks that it’s still a iHome Smart Plug, but doesn’t check if it’s the EXACT same iHome Smart Plug with the same MAC address.

And each device will have different failure modes. Whether it responds helpfully with an error or throws the wrong type of error causing the caller to sit and time out, or retry multiple times before giving up (potentially different amount of time for each caller).

Okay your device knows it needs to refresh its cache. Does it just refresh for that one device (plus the second one it thought was still at at the new IP, and then the third one it thought…) or does it dump the whole cache and rebuild it via DHCP requests for the 20, 40, 80 devices in your home?

And does it rebuild the cache in the background, as-needed? Or is it dumber than that?



This is the real world all this happens.

And all this DHCP faffing about and cache-refreshing will slow down any non-cached lookups.

Wifi networks, especially with many devices, especially with many different vendor-types of devices work WAAAAY better with static IPs. Doubly true for the HomeKit comm protocol.

If you want a 10x better HomeKit experience, try it out. Otherwise you’re just navelgazing and arguing theoreticals.
 
But is that really the case with DHCP? All devices? Multiple times per day?

If a home automation device is always on and connected, why exactly would its IP address be doing all this shifting and jumping around? Sure, IF your computer shuts down AND its DHCP lease expires AND iPhone later comes home and grabs that IP... but we're talking about automation devices that are always home and powered. Unless your Wifi is also being used by the Starbucks next door with lots of new devices coming/going, most of the time I would expect the same IP to get re-assigned when the lease expires. I know... no guarantee of same IP, but I wouldn't characterize the entire table as shifting and jumping around... routers do have some built-in caching.

DHCP is a very typical thing that non-tech, "it just works", kind of people use. If there are specific network conditions that must be met for Home Pods or HomeKit to function properly, then Apple needs to publish the guidelines. Whatever the case, when Home Pods that worked under 15.x are broken under 16.x, I am not so sure about blaming the network, when that's not what changed.

Anecdotally, when I was having my big HomeKit issues with 16.3.x for two months, I needed to reboot my router and hub once per day to keep HomeKit working properly. Thinking it was my 24-hour DHCP lease, I changed it to 48 hours and it made absolutely no difference. Then 16.4 was released and the issue immediately resolved itself.
I couldn't agree more. Same thing for me. I had 11 HomePod minis at before I updated to OS 16 that were working just fine. The second I updated them to OS 16 they started to stop working correctly. I find it very hard to blame the network considering those facts.

Since last September I keep rebooting ans restoring the HomePods, but it just doesn't work. Not only Apple hasn't been able to fix their mediocre OS 16, they actually made it worse with 16.4. Now I sometimes hear 2 seconds of a random song before a new song starts.

I hope OS 16.5 will fix the stability issues once and for all. If not, I'll have to make a complaint and ask for a refund as the product is just not usable anymore.
 
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Write down all the IPs of your HK devices, then check them a week later.

But we're not talking about problems once/week. It's constant problems all day long that people are describing (that only started with OS 16); and I am sure a few of them may chime in here to say they've even tried static IP addresses.
 
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But we're not talking about problems once/week. It's constant problems all day long that people are describing (that only started with OS 16); and I am sure a few of them may chime in here to say they've even tried static IP addresses.
I think you’re now talking about sudden issues with a HK update.

But I was replying to the question about what the ideal network setup is.

Any smart home with a decent number of smart devices (not just a handful of bridges/homepods) is going to be WAY flakier using dynamic IPs.

There is good technical reason for this, the fix is simple (if a bit of a pain), and plenty of people have eliminated a whole host of HomeKit issues by switching to static IPs.

That _is_ the ideal setup. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other issues at play.
 
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