HomeKit More HomeKit problems

[klspahr]

Woke up this morning (Oh no, I’m woke!!) and a bunch of Matter/Thread stuff showed as “Not Responding”. My EcoBee thermostat and Eufycams were out too. I could use the device specific apps and all those devices were accessible and operational. Surprise! A HomeKit problem.

I was using a HomePod mini as my HomeKit hub since I still have old AppleTVs that don’t support Matter/Thread. And since I have automatic updates turned off for my HomePods there was the 18.3 update available. (There is a good reason that I have this turned off, but this post is about this event.) I foolishly thought maybe that was the problem.

I installed the update and nothing was fixed. Except now audio playing from the HomePods goes on and off. So much for the improved “reliability and performance” this upgrade promised. I am getting 350Mb/s on my internet connection, and yet it can’t play a continuous internet radio stream. I swear every upgrade just makes things worse. I told myself I was going to stop doing upgrades but I got sucker in to doing it again .

Everything showed up on HomeKit the night before.

I’m going on a trip tomorrow and now I have to troubleshoot another HomeKit failure so my automation will work while I’m away.

I wish there was an alternative. No, I’m not going to notify google and Samsung every time I turn a light on. I tried HomeBrew and it is a hodgepodge bowl of issues. Many years ago I got training in one of the early home automation “systems”, that was nothing but problems. I know why that company disappeared. Ok, I’ll stop whining…

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
Hey Apple, maybe you should change homekit’s name to HomeS_hit

 

[StumpyBloke]

I don’t have HomeS4it problems but since the latest update I too have the music stopping and starting when streaming from Apple Music, so you’re not alone there.

Apple‘s quality control goes from bad to God-awful. Truly and utterly indefensible how bad they are now. Tim Cook needs sacking and they need to get somebody in who actually gives a *^%# about the customers rather than screwing everybody over for their last penny whilst not giving a flying eff about the crap that they are vomiting out every year.

 

[klspahr]

BTW, I have another home that has almost a duplicate of the devices I have at this house. It has not been updated in a year. Guess what everything is online. The “upgraded” HomeKit setup here is constantly dropping devices and the cameras take for ever to show video if they happen to be online. Yet the eufy app connects immediately.

Has anyone on this forum ever seen a reply from Apple where they act like they want to fix issues? I can think of only one time Apple support actually helped me fix an issue. Mostly after spending a bunch of time, my call is dropped and my case is marked as solved.

At least they have more money than they know what to do with, you can’t expect them to waste it on taking care of their customers.

 

[Itinj24]

BTW, I have another home that has almost a duplicate of the devices I have at this house. It has not been updated in a year. Guess what everything is online. The “upgraded” HomeKit setup here is constantly dropping devices and the cameras take for ever to show video if they happen to be online. Yet the eufy app connects immediately.

Has anyone on this forum ever seen a reply from Apple where they act like they want to fix issues? I can think of only one time Apple support actually helped me fix an issue. Mostly after spending a bunch of time, my call is dropped and my case is marked as solved.

At least they have more money than they know what to do with, you can’t expect them to waste it on taking care of their customers.

I’ve sent them numerous bug reports on an issue with colored light bulbs that started with iOS 17.0. The issue still persists.

 

[AL2TEACH]

I was thinking it's time for me to upgrade Home with Matter but I'm in no hurry again.

 

[adrianlondon]

My only home automation stuff is Philips Hue.

"Accessory not responding" would happen about 10% of the time when asking Siri to turn a light or scene on or off. I got that error almost half the time if the light scene was changed by one of my time-based automations.

I deleted all scenes from Homekit and created shortcuts with each scene name. They simply call another shortcut passing its name as a parameter. This other shortcut, that I like to call the controller, activates the scene using Hue's API directly.

Number of times this has failed? None. Not once.

(The above is a workaround as Siri is too stupid to be able to pass a parameter to a shortcut in one go, such as "Siri Scene Evening" where it runs a shortcut called "Scene" and sends the parameter "Evening" to it.)

I still keep the lights in Homekit for convenience. "Siri, living room wall light 50%" works most of the time, plus I like having each light in a page in the new iOS 18 control panel, as the icon shows each light's state.

 

[Bl0ckHe1d]

I was using a HomePod mini as my HomeKit hub since I still have old AppleTVs that don’t support Matter/Thread. And since I have automatic updates turned off for my HomePods there was the 18.3 update available. (There is a good reason that I have this turned off, but this post is about this event.) I foolishly thought maybe that was the problem.

I note that you only have the HomePod mini in your HomeKit environment. It may be possible that your Matter / Thread border router (i.e. HomePod mini) isn't powerful enough to reach your end point Matter nodes depending on where these devices are situated within your home. Also I did read somewhere that although Matter protocol is upgraded to version 1.4 or thereabouts whereas the likes of Apple, Alexa and Google are running behind with Google being the worse offender still running on Matter 1.0!

On the issue of the likes of Apple not keeping up to date on Matter versions, I have since migrated all my HomeDevices over to Home Assistant dumping HomeKit and use the HAOS Matter Server and not had any issues since.