HomeKit No response when away from home

[Dilbert214]

Hello , I’ve recently noticed I can not control any of my devices when away from home. It’s normally not a feature that I use so it could be a couple things. Everything works fine when I’m home

Three weeks ago, I went away from my house and every one of my devices and sometimes hubs show no response.

I’m currently on iOS 18.5.

I have 3 HomePod minis and 2 newer ( within a year old) Apple tv’s

My devices are from meross, Nanoleaf and eve

I’ve tried swapping out routers ( borrowed a friends) to check and see if it’s the router with no results. I have rebooted every single device in my house as well as completely removed every HomePod and TV.

At this point, I feel have gotten it down to either a network possible forwarding problem or some sort of Apple setting that I just can’t figure out

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[dotme]

I think you're on the right track with the network and a possible forwarding issue although the new HomeKit architecture is supposed to use the active HomeKit hub even when you're at home so I'm not sure why you wouldn't see the same failures when you're at home.

In short, the active hub (Whether AppleTV or HomePod) needs to see all the accessories on the network (peer-to-peer) and Apple's Bonjour / mDNS protocol is part of that. Some Access Points can block that or have trouble with it, especially if there are "WiFi Extenders" involved. For testing, if you can temporarily simplify your network by turning off any extenders etc, just to see if that resolves the issues, then you'll have a place to start. Hope this helps.

 

[srl7741]

iOS 18.5 was just released yesterday and you posted last Saturday talking about an issue previous to post so I'm going to take a stab and guess your Beta software was not playing nice with other versions of the Apple TV or HomePods software.

Update everything to the current non-beta software and see if everything stabilizes.

 

[Dilbert214]

Hello, to update …. I have tried to swap wifi out. I went from Orbi to Verizon’s wifi to now a eero 6+ system as everyone said it was seamless with HomeKit ( sadly not this version ). I have also updated to 18.5 now and no change.

I have also called Apple assistance with no assistance


If anyone has wifi settings etc to get this thing to work … or any other ideas , let me know. I getting aggravated with Siri/ Apple these days

 

[Dilbert214]

Dear God, after all this time after switching my router three times and now two calls to Apple I told them multiple times that this didn’t happen until after I went on a vacation

All my issues of my HomeKit not working whenever I’m away from my home was based off of the time I changed the date time and set to automatic and everything started working. So if anyone out there is ever having issues, check your date and time and avoid the hassle with Apple.

 

[dotme]

Happy to hear you got it working. Confused about the cause/solution though. Are you saying that you were manually setting date/time on your iOS device when traveling instead of letting GPS/iOS automatically detect the time zone you were in?

 

[Dilbert214]

Hey , yes …. We were on a cruise changing time zones 3 times so we had to manually set it forward to ensure our time was correct so we could make sure we got up on time …. Plus the cruise ship syncs the gps/ star-link to Miami time

When I finally figured it out today , it was set to Havana.

The thing that bothers me is … why my home automation cares what time zone I’m in or if I’m trying to control it from “Havana”. Or really anywhere

My next trip I’m gonna see if it freaks out crossing into west Tennessee ( standard time) or if it just has an issue with manual mode … or Havana … hahhahaha

 

[dotme]

That's very interesting. I wonder if iCloud cares about request timestamps and the time change to manual caused an unexpected UTC offset, creating an issue. Good detective work on your part for sure!