HomeKit HomeKit went from near flawless to barely usable

[FRVRandAFTR]

My HomeKit setup has always worked great but recently has became close to unusable. The issues started when I added more lights to a room. Before it was flawless, at home and away. It started to remember old lights that I'd completely removed, so when I say "turn the lights on" it will and then will say Light A and Light B (example names for the lights that I removed) aren't responding. I researched and couldn't find much, so I decided delete the home and add a new one starting fresh. I also factory reset my HomePods. Oh boy, did that make things worse. I finally got everything added back to the new home profile but so many more issues arose from starting fresh. Before, with the HomePods I would just say "turn living room lights on" and it was that easy. Now I have to word it very specifically since the triggers work sometimes and sometimes they don't. For example, I have to say "turn the lights in the living room on" instead of "turn on living room lights" some times it works, sometimes it doesn't. I get constant errors about accessories that never had issues not responding (sometimes it will if I ask four times in a row), instead of it just knowing an accessory is a light, I have to say the names I gave them when setting up HomeKit the second time, I get errors on the HomePod saying it can't control secure accessories (lights?) that it sometime will control with no issues, and to top it off I think it still may remember some of the old lights... Also a couple times I think it said it couldn't/didn't do something I requested when in fact it did. Big HomeKit fan, I just don't know what's causing this and hope they fix it because it shouldn't be this difficult and never has been. Also, my Apple TVs still remember the old home's name that I thought I deleted but there's no way as far as I know to have admin level control over all of my iCloud devices and the HomeKits they're part of to get that old one deleted.

 

[dotme]

The nuclear option is best reserved for catastrophic loss of functionality in my opinion. In this case, a more surgical approach might have yielded much better results.

Your initial problem sounds like an iCloud sync issue. If you have more than one device (iPad, or Mac) in addition to your iPhone, it's possible that a secondary device is uploading an older configuration to iCloud, and that's being distributed instead. Best thing to have done in that case would be to log all devices that can "write" to HomeKit out of iCloud except your iPhone. Make a small change to HomeKit, wait 15 mins, then log other devices back in. Note that this doesn't apply to hubs. Those just need to be restarted in most cases, however I have seen instances where AppleTVs can benefit from signing out and back in again to refresh HomeKit data.

Now that you've deleted everything and have chosen to rebuild, a similar approach is probably best. If power cycling your Apple TVs doesn't help them fetch current data, signing them out of iCloud, restarting, and then signing back in again should do the trick.

In general, when you make changes to HomeKit like adding/removing accessories, there's a certain amount of propagation lag. Allowing 10-15 mins for things to percolate is never a bad idea. Hope this helps.

 

[MBAir2010]

YES! My HomeKit went from near flawless to barely usable as well

I turned that off for a month and regret using the entire system today.

shame...even simple things like playing a TV show
those 2 mini speakers sound great tho, but the software is garbage!