Apple to Re-Release Revamped HomeKit Architecture in iOS 16.4

[svish]

Hopefully all the bugs are fixed this time.

 

[macrumoursnerd]

Yes, it’s insane how they’re handling it.
It’s crazy they broke HomeKit, crazy they haven’t fixed it in the betas before the public release, crazy they’re taking so much time to fix it instead of rolling it back with a minor point update…

Once upon a time they cared enough to issue a public apology and fire Scott Forstall because maps was bad. Now it’s just another broken feature to add to a long list, such as notifications, Home Screen, autocorrect, Siri, etc…

I successfully rolled back to the old architecture via a profile Apple support sent some customers (found it on Reddit). It was a bit of a pain since it requires all iOS devices (even ppl you had invited and also upgrade the architecture) to reset their home app by applying a profile. HomePods also need to be reset but no need for a profile. My ATV didn’t require resetting, just turned off HomeKit in the settings and then back on.

All in all it went like this: have every iOS device that had the new architecture apply the profile and then go into settings, home, reset. Reboot the device and make sure it reverted to the old architecture by using an iPad and checking if “use as Home hub” shows up in the settings. If so then you’re good to proceed.
Reset HomePods to factory settings.
Add them back to the home app,
Add your accessories.
Set up your scenes, automations and so on.
Reboot your ATV and then toggle on/off HomeKit in the settings.
Open Home in your Mac computers and ensure the new home is active (sometimes a duplicate could be shown, delete any duplicates).
The last two steps could take a few tries.

Fingers crossed and things are back to normal 😂

Now this is far from user-friendly and no end user should have to go through this.

 

[Dan Pandrea]

If Home could display temperatures in .1 degree Celsius increments, that would be great. So far they're doing it only on the lockscreen widget. The app itself can only show Celsius temperatures in 0.5 degree increments.

Wallpaper sync between my own devices, as well as other Home users is another thing I really want.

 

[Phaseangle]

The same issue that befell Apple when Europe ruled on the USB C Charger will happen again when europe and other countries rule that all domestic devices should be able to operate under common prootcols, negating waste while boltering product developent and efficiency - best Apple plan for that, rather than trying to hobble along with this dead end closed ecosystem.

I thought this was to centre Homekit around Matter.

 

[chrono1081]

I'm not pushing back. I'm honestly interested in your opinion. I'm a senior dev with 25 years of experience. I don't often get asked to interview candidates, but when I do, here's what I do.

I tell the candidate that we're going to pretend we've been hired to write the backend for an online poker site. His immediate task is to write a method for evaluating 5 card poker hands with the goal of being able to compare any two hands and determine a winner, loser or tie.

I leave the language as the candidate's choice. I don't sit back and just stare at him, it becomes a conversation about how to tackle what is a reasonably trivial and relatively familiar task for people, but one which almost nobody considers how to translate into code (as it happens, I did do this exercise for fun once, so I know at least two solutions).

It also has the benefit of being entirely divorced from the job the candidate is applying for, so he doesn't feel like he's being asked to work for free.

Only once did this fall completely flat because the candidate did not know anything about poker, so I had to do something else. But for the most part, I feel like this has resulted in my making pretty quality decisions - that is, they either resulted in a good hire, or if not a hire then it agreed with other evaluations I heard about later.

What do you think?

Those kinds of things are fine as they represent a real world scenario for a business need and are more about the architecture of the application (although I'd be screwed since I don't know poker either).

I'm talking the purposefully tricky ones that will want you to solve something that takes time to think about right on the spot like this.

Sure, give me some time to think about it and I'll find you a solution, but the fact they ask questions like this on a white board with a panel of people *who already know the answer* and want an answer on the spot is ridiculous.

Or the kind of questions that ask some obscure thing you could look up in seconds but the interviewer assumes since you don't know it (since likely you don't use it) you must not know anything about the language, like when I was asked in an interview how many substring functions Swift strings have. I don't know, and neither would really anyone else without checking the documentation (which is a huge part of development work).

 

[Aston441]

I have a bunch of smart devices and Siri and Homekit are totally useless. Google Home just works. HomeKit is the most bewildering piece of software I've ever encountered. It's very pretty to look at but impossible to configure. I love Apple products and would love to use HomeKit but it is just so crappy I gave up after a few hours of messing with it.

Google Home, sadly, is so much better than HomeKit. Now I am just waiting for HomeKit to be able to detect my smart devices and let me manage them as effortlessly as Google Home.

Alexa has been automating my stuff for 5 or 6 years. Perfect for everything since day 1. I tried HomeKit two years ago, it was impossibly obtuse so I just quit after an hour, there was no point since everything was already perfect with Alexa. Then last year, in a moment of boredom I tried again, managed to get at least my Hue light bulbs working. A few months later Apple updated… something… somewhere… ??? and everything disappeared. I tried adding stuff back… nothing.

Was I going to spend hours tracking all this down, while Alexa has been perfect for 6 years? Hahaha no.

The wealthiest company on earth continues to exist only because of the marketing genius of blue vs green bubble.

 

[robotfist]

Nothing beats Walkie Talkie as the worst piece of Apple software of all time. It's amazing to me it's still included in WatchOS.

 

[BugeyeSTI]

I successfully rolled back to the old architecture via a profile Apple support sent some customers (found it on Reddit). It was a bit of a pain since it requires all iOS devices (even ppl you had invited and also upgrade the architecture) to reset their home app by applying a profile. HomePods also need to be reset but no need for a profile. My ATV didn’t require resetting, just turned off HomeKit in the settings and then back on.

All in all it went like this: have every iOS device that had the new architecture apply the profile and then go into settings, home, reset. Reboot the device and make sure it reverted to the old architecture by using an iPad and checking if “use as Home hub” shows up in the settings. If so then you’re good to proceed.
Reset HomePods to factory settings.
Add them back to the home app,
Add your accessories.
Set up your scenes, automations and so on.
Reboot your ATV and then toggle on/off HomeKit in the settings.
Open Home in your Mac computers and ensure the new home is active (sometimes a duplicate could be shown, delete any duplicates).
The last two steps could take a few tries.

Fingers crossed and things are back to normal 😂

Now this is far from user-friendly and no end user should have to go through this.

Does not work. Just went through all your steps multiple times and it only resets HomeKit doesn't remove the new architecture...

 

[WilliamG]

I'm one of the lucky ones, I upgraded the day it came out and have zero issues, but then again I've never had any issues with HomeKit. 3 HomePods, about 20 lights, 1 smart lock, couple cameras, 4 ATVs. Everything responds so much faster

Siri doesn't work on my OG HomePods anymore. Always fails the first command, and then works the second time. So that's awesome.

 

[Fordski]

I took the nuclear approach yesterday and removed and re setup my home yesterday and it didn't fix anything. Currently cannot setup HomePods (continuously configuring) and my Apple Watch home app says "no home connected" so I can't use Siri on my watch to control anything). I really hope this gets fixed soon as I can't leave my HomePods plugged in as Siri commands related to Home Devices such as lights etc. fail when handled by the HomePod.

 

[WannaGoMac]

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeKit/comments/yy2oy7

Maybe this will help someone. This is the official Apple secret profile so you can completely erase and reset your home kit. Some people report it helps.

 

[WannaGoMac]

I took the nuclear approach yesterday and removed and re setup my home yesterday and it didn't fix anything. Currently cannot setup HomePods (continuously configuring) and my Apple Watch home app says "no home connected" so I can't use Siri on my watch to control anything). I really hope this gets fixed soon as I can't leave my HomePods plugged in as Siri commands related to Home Devices such as lights etc. fail when handled by the HomePod.

Check out the link I just posted you might wanna go nuclear with that first

 

[BugeyeSTI]

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeKit/comments/yy2oy7

Maybe this will help someone. This is the official Apple secret profile so you can completely erase and reset your home kit. Some people report it helps.

Tried this today and it didn't fix anything. All my HomeKit devices say "no response" just like they did before.. Basically a ton of work to set everything back up after the reset with the same outcome.. What is needed is either the new architecture needs to be removed completely (Apple won't allow down grading) or they need to fix the new architecture.. I never had any issues on the old HomeKit, all this started after the "upgrade"

 

[GregK.]

I would just like it if Homekit would stop sending me notifications about all of my cameras supposedly going offline or online all at once, even though I told it not to.

 

[WannaGoMac]

Tried this today and it didn't fix anything. All my HomeKit devices say "no response" just like they did before.. Basically a ton of work to set everything back up after the reset with the same outcome.. What is needed is either the new architecture needs to be removed completely (Apple won't allow down grading) or they need to fix the new architecture.. I never had any issues on the old HomeKit, all this started after the "upgrade"

That sucks. Maybe just switch to Google, i understand its much better?

 

[BugeyeSTI]

That sucks. Maybe just switch to Google, i understand its much better?

I'll give Apple a chance to correct the software.. Hopefully it will be included in 16.3.1 or 16.4. If they can't fix it, at the minimum they should allow us to revert back to the old architecture. I'm pretty confident they don't want HomeKit to be tossed by customers and see them use google or another competitors software solututions

 

[Morac]

I’m wondering how long after the update gets re-released that it’s pulled again. It obviously wasn’t tested before being released in 16.2, so I’m not sure why people are expecting it to be tested for 16.4.

It also must do more than just send all traffic through the Home hubs or it wouldn’t be so unstable and work worse than the old update.

Home was fairly reliable since I set mine up years ago, but since updating to the new Home architecture in 16.2:

1. At least one HomePod or device has had issues after a firmware update. For the update to 16.3.1, a HomePod mini got stuck as ”Not Responding” in Home despite being able to handle personal requests and play music. Rebooting it didn’t help, I had to reboot all my home hubs and my iPhone to fix that.
2. HKSV recording simply doesn’t work. I’ve gotten it to work temporarily by rebooting all my home hubs but that doesn’t last long so I’ve just given up trying and now use Blink and Ring camera which “just work”.
3. I lost adaptive lighting on my Hue lights, but eventually managed to get them back by removing all hue devices and re-adding them. So far they’ve not broke again.
4. My Wemo switch frequently duplicates itself when my network goes down such as when rebooting my router or if my Internet goes down. I have to remove and re-add it to fix that.

I no longer recommend Home since it is completely unreliable now and it’s obvious that Apple doesn’t care enough about it to even bother testing it before pushing out changes to it.

 

[Mustangguy1967]

164,000 employees not enough you say.

How many of those people have work ethic or finish what they start? It seems like Apple might consider hiring some adults who can finish what the distracted children start. Wouldn’t it be funny if iPhones were the very distraction that is causing this paradox?

Apple immediate employee bulletin:

So as to reduce distraction and improve productivity, employees will be leaving their smart devices at the time check-in area. This includes Apple Watches, iPhone’s, iPad’s, AirPod’s and any other electronic device not specifically issued to said employees to complete specific tasks.

 

[WilliamG]

I’m wondering how long after the update gets re-released that it’s pulled again. It obviously wasn’t tested before being released in 16.2, so I’m not sure why people are expecting it to be tested for 16.4.

It also must do more than just send all traffic through the Home hubs or it wouldn’t be so unstable and work worse than the old update.

Home was fairly reliable since I set mine up years ago, but since updating to the new Home architecture in 16.2:

1. At least one HomePod or device has had issues after a firmware update. For the update to 16.3.1, a HomePod mini got stuck as ”Not Responding” in Home despite being able to handle personal requests and play music. Rebooting it didn’t help, I had to reboot all my home hubs and my iPhone to fix that.
2. HKSV recording simply doesn’t work. I’ve gotten it to work temporarily by rebooting all my home hubs but that doesn’t last long so I’ve just given up trying and now use Blink and Ring camera which “just work”.
3. I lost adaptive lighting on my Hue lights, but eventually managed to get them back by removing all hue devices and re-adding them. So far they’ve not broke again.
4. My Wemo switch frequently duplicates itself when my network goes down such as when rebooting my router or if my Internet goes down. I have to remove and re-add it to fix that.

I no longer recommend Home since it is completely unreliable now and it’s obvious that Apple doesn’t care enough about it to even bother testing it before pushing out changes to it.

I haven’t had these issues. The only one I did have was having to ask Siri twice problem on the HomePods that was fixed in the last HomePod update. My Hue lights, door locks, Caseta switches etc have all worked fine. It’s frustrating how variable the experience is for many people.

PS The one issue I do have is not being able to assign which HomePod or Apple TV is the main home hub. So annoying.