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zorinlynx

macrumors G3
Original poster
May 31, 2007
8,447
19,283
Florida, USA
I have two Apple TVs, and one of them (an Apple TV 4K) was functioning as a homekit hub.

So I noticed that it was being really chatty on the Internet, and I never access my HomeKit stuff from offsite so I figured I didn't need HomeKit Hub at all, so I disabled it on both Apple TVs to see if that was the cause of the chattiness.

I was immediately pleased to notice that HomeKit seems to be respond a LOT faster now. "Hey siri, set office lights to 50%" happens almost immediately, whereas before there was a two second delay. Has anyone else noticed this? I mean, I'm glad the delay is gone but if I ever need to use a HomeKit Hub in the future, I'd like to know why it was so slow and fix it.

(The chattiness has stopped for now, by the way. It's not really a huge deal, I'd just prefer devices not be needlessly active if I'm not using them.)
 
I’m curious if you’d have seen the same improvement by disabling the hub on just one of the AppleTVs. HomeKit does seem to work better with only one hub active.
 
I turned off both my hubs on 2 apple tv 4ks (gen 1 and gen 2). Homekit and siri do work better just using homepods and homepod minis as hubs at least on my network.
 
So I noticed that it was being really chatty on the Internet, and I never access my HomeKit stuff from offsite so I figured I didn't need HomeKit Hub at all, so I disabled it on both Apple TVs to see if that was the cause of the chattiness.

I was immediately pleased to notice that HomeKit seems to be respond a LOT faster now.
When you're home, I believe the iPhone is supposed to directly control accessories whether you have HK hubs or not (Unless Apple recently changed this). If you download the (free) Discovery app on your iOS device and open it when on your network, can you see all your accessories under _hap._tcp?

I wonder if your iPhone thinks it can't see the accessories when at home, at which point it might use the HK Hub (via iCloud, as if you were out of the house) which may explain the latency and the chatter. I assume you're issuing those "Hey Siri" commands to the iPhone?
 
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