You Can Select a Preferred Home Hub in iOS 18

[Burger Thing]

This was already a thing? I have 2 Apple TVs. Enabled one as the hub while the other is disabled...

Yes. It's a thing. Come back and report when you have > 10+ Homepods and Apple TVs and running dozens of Thread, Matter and standard Homekit devices in a mash WIFI Network and not 2 Apple TVs and one Homekit Light bulb in a 25 sqft student shoe box. Thank you.

 

[tennisproha]

Yes. It's a thing. Come back and report when you have > 10+ Homepods and Apple TVs and running dozens of Thread, Matter and standard Homekit devices in a mash WIFI Network and not 2 Apple TVs and one Homekit Light bulb in a 25 sqft student shoe box. Thank you.

It's already a thing as in, this feature already existed...

 

[Agent OrangeZ]

I hate the fact that I even have to have a hub to share the single Homekit enabled device in my house. My wife and I have iPhones, but we don't want Homepods... we have Google speakers, Android/Google TVs for our TVs. I have a garage door opener that works with Google, Amazon and Homekit. I got it because I want to be able to ask Siri to open my garage door on my phone. Well... I can do it... but it is only assigned to my Apple ID... so my wife cannot use Siri on her phone to do it. From what I read, I need a Homekit Hub to be able to achieve this. Why can't I just invite others to be able to have access... or even just have my iCloud Family have access with a simple toggle?

 

[Burger Thing]

It's already a thing as in, this feature already existed...

So the article is around 5 years late to party then and most of the users of complex homekit arrangements were just too daft to figure it out - unlike you? Is that what you are saying?

 

[Surf Monkey]

This was already a thing? I have 2 Apple TVs. Enabled one as the hub while the other is disabled...

It was possible before the latest round of big updates to tvOS. When they dropped the Movies and TV apps is when it happened. They removed the controls for enabling and disabling home hubs from the AppleTV and changed it to an automatic background function.

 

[Surf Monkey]

It's already a thing as in, this feature already existed...

For a long time it did. But it was removed. They’re bringing it back. That’s a very good thing.

 

[Surf Monkey]

I hate the fact that I even have to have a hub to share the single Homekit enabled device in my house. My wife and I have iPhones, but we don't want Homepods... we have Google speakers, Android/Google TVs for our TVs. I have a garage door opener that works with Google, Amazon and Homekit. I got it because I want to be able to ask Siri to open my garage door on my phone. Well... I can do it... but it is only assigned to my Apple ID... so my wife cannot use Siri on her phone to do it. From what I read, I need a Homekit Hub to be able to achieve this. Why can't I just invite others to be able to have access... or even just have my iCloud Family have access with a simple toggle?

That’s super annoying.

Here’s another one: if my internet service drops (it’s Comcast so it does that fairly regularly) my entire Home system stops working. It’s the stupidest, most bothersome thing ever. Why in the world would Home need to access the Internet to turn my lights on and off? Hue can do it, but Home can’t? An incredible oversight.

 

[Hildy]

Why can’t they all work together and help control the HomeKit enabled devices which they are closest to or most appropriate to control?

 

[Surf Monkey]

Why can’t they all work together and help control the HomeKit enabled devices which they are closest to or most appropriate to control?

That would be awesome. Like a mesh network for Home. But no, it doesn’t work like that. Home assigns a single device to be the hub.

 

[Debauch]

About. Fookin. Time.

 

[tennisproha]

It was possible before the latest round of big updates to tvOS. When they dropped the Movies and TV apps is when it happened. They removed the controls for enabling and disabling home hubs from the AppleTV and changed it to an automatic background function.

oh really? I hadn't noticed. I disconnected one of the ATVs b/c we don't watch there much so it's just been sitting there. Glad they're bringing it back I guess. I did see they removed the iPad from being a hub.

 

[SDJim]

This is good news, considering my HomePods don't have Thread radios but my ATV does!

 

[WU27f1xcCs]

So annoying that they removed iPads as home hubs

 

[Diopter]

Holy cow, finally.

Now how about letting us directly edit the location of a Home instead of trying to convince it to change via the Maps home location and Contacts card address and so on? (and before anyone jumps in and says "just do ...": the solutions regularly offered for this problem do not work reliably and sometimes even a full reset doesn't fix the problem and location-based automations therefore fail to work properly for some users)

 

[svish]

Good to know about the change. Definitely will be useful to some.

 

[joecomo]

great, if you have several homes connected via vpn

 

[joecomo]

Holy cow, finally.

Now how about letting us directly edit the location of a Home instead of trying to convince it to change via the Maps home location and Contacts card address and so on? (and before anyone jumps in and says "just do ...": the solutions regularly offered for this problem do not work reliably and sometimes even a full reset doesn't fix the problem and location-based automations therefore fail to work properly for some users)

yes - this is annoying about Apple.
Their implicit assumption is, that everything works, so they never provide you with some advanced setup to fix things.

That is much better in windows- they know, they tend to **** up …

 

[CouldBeWorse]

Nice. I’ll probably try setting my AppleTV as a preferred hub since it’s connected via Ethernet.

 

[Mac Fly (film)]

Perhaps the best feature of my home is having all dumb home devices. Never have any problems with this setup.

 

[airwalk331]

Can my MBP be a hub? ;-)

I wish! I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to make my iPad Pro a hub! I live in a studio apt, don’t see the need for an AppleTV with my Sony tv already having airplay. My iPad Pro sits on my countertop and I’d love to just use that as my hub. An expensive hub (I do use it for other things) but it never leaves my kitchen counter!

 

[leicaman]

This alone makes me want to upgrade to the beta right now.

 

[KENESS]

It's already a thing as in, this feature already existed...

If you had any HomePods you couldn't disable them. So they could take over at any time, and you had no control. Even when AppleTV allowed you to disable it, HomePods have never had that option.

And technically, even then, you had no way to set a preferred hub you could just disable it on any AppleTV's you didn't want to BE a hub. But that also meant they wouldn't take over in the case of the main hub going offline for whatever reason, so they wouldn't be there as a backup.

So yes, this is a NEW thing.

 

[Surf Monkey]

If you had any HomePods you couldn't disable them. So they could take over at any time, and you had no control. Even when AppleTV allowed you to disable it, HomePods have never had that option.

And technically, even then, you had no way to set a preferred hub you could just disable it on any AppleTV's you didn't want to BE a hub. But that also meant they wouldn't take over in the case of the main hub going offline for whatever reason, so they wouldn't be there as a backup.

So yes, this is a NEW thing.

I don’t own a HomePod so I didn’t realize those were never able to be selected/deselected.

 

[Onelifenofear]

I don’t own a HomePod so I didn’t realize those were never able to be selected/deselected.

Sure it’s only ATVs that can be turned off in the ATV Settings.

I faked this behaviour for the past few years.

Stick an ATV4k Ethernet on the beta updates and turn off automatic updates on everything else. The ATV remains the Hub and it’s now rock solid And I really glad they are doing this finally…

…Now if only they could add search.

 

[KENESS]

Sure it’s only ATVs that can be turned off in the ATV Settings.

I faked this behaviour for the past few years.

Stick an ATV4k Ethernet on the beta updates and turn off automatic updates on everything else. The ATV remains the Hub and it’s now rock solid And I really glad they are doing this finally…

…Now if only they could add search.

That's a pretty reliable workaround as far as I've heard. Newest versions were always preferred, and so if you set one to be a beta and the others not, you're good. The others would still take over if the main/beta went out, though, so you still have your backup, too.

But it'll be nice to not need to bother with that anymore. I don't do betas. And if I don't have them set to automatic, I forget for AGES... hah

I've been lucky in that my HomePods, even though they're WiFi not ethernet, have always been 99% reliable anyway as Home Hubs. And it wouldn't surprise me if those very random times when things were slow or bad, perhaps the hub was in the middle of its update anyway. Or it was just my internet. (We're talking about maybe 2 hiccups a year. Nothing that really "got" to me.)

Siri is dumb as a brick, of course. But RELIABLY dumb as a brick.