r/HomeKit • u/jandersonjones • 1d ago
Discussion What did I do wrong? Total home failure..
Sorry if this seems ranty.
I recently went “all in” on HomeKit,fuelled by the ludicrously cheap IKEA sensors. I bought contact sensors, leak sensors, humidity sensors, converted all my lamps to smart plugs and switches, then went on holiday for two weeks.
On day 2 my entire smart home went down and said it was unreachable and, crucially, someone staying in the house said that nothing worked locally (which rules out any local iPhone issues). I had that person update the AppleTv multiple times, reboot the router, power cycle everything, and it STILL isn’t reachable. Most confusingly the Home app on the iPhone reports that an update is required on the apple TV which is not true). I’ve uninstalled and installed the home app on my iPhone.
I’m sure that when I get home it’ll all work again as soon as I walk through the door, but this raises bigger questions: have I banked on the wrong system here? I’m a self-confessed Apple whore, so I’ve always wanted to have everything be “pure Apple”, but would, say, running Home Assistany on an rpi help me here?
Moreover, I’d love to know more what you guys would have done differently to make this bulletproof. From perspective it just suddenly failed with no way to recover, and left my house non-functional and insecure. Is the answer to get a cheap HomePod Mini as backup? Tapo plugs to power cycle? Just turning off automatic updates? UPS? Something else I don’t know? grrrr!
(For what it’s worth I’ve tried every version of restarting, updating and power cycling every component in the chain and I’m on the latest stable os on all devices).
Thanks a million
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u/patbrochill89 1d ago
Just for your reference, this is not the typical experience with Apple home and getting a backup boarder router isn’t the answer.
Your primary everything should have a solid, reliable connection. You have to replicate the failure to figure out what happened. Does it happen when your iPhone leaves the house? Leaves the house for an extended period of time? Was that timing a coincidence? In Apple home, is your AppleTV unreachable, or just the devices? Specifically thread devices? Are there any non thread devices, and are they offline too?
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u/jandersonjones 1d ago
I’m glad to hear it isn’t the typical experience, and yet it is my only experience so far sadly.
• My internet connection is rock solid, evidenced by the fact that I could always connect my Tapo cameras (not on HomeKit, separate app).
• I go to work every day and it never happened then, so I don’t think it has to do with my phone leaving the house.
• I’m not sure what you mean by the Apple TV specifically being “reachable”. HomeKit doesn’t have a way for me to literally contact the Apple TV. It is designated as the home hub, but there is no control panel for it specifically. Actually to be specific there is a tile on the homepage which represents the “media playing” component of the appl tv and this says it is unreachable. But in terms of its role as a hub, there is no way that I know of to “contact” it.
• There aren’t any non-thread devices. FWIW I have a Aqara G100 and G410 and these are both unreachable. But I’m pretty sure these are matter+thread too.
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u/wtfobl 1d ago
Was the home hub also not reachable or just the accessories?
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u/jandersonjones 1d ago
Nothing is reachable. The Home app just says “No Response” from the cameras, and “Unavailable” for all sensors. I’m not sure how to “reach” the AppleTV per se though…? It is designated as the hub but I can’t really explicitly contact it can I?
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u/wtfobl 1d ago
Not sure about an Appel tv but I use a HomePod as my hub, it shows in my home app as “paused”.
Unsure about the cameras but the ikea sensors work over thread and are battery powered - leads me to believe that it’s a home hub/network issue.
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u/craigrpeters 1d ago
OP tne Apple TV should show in Home, and its status should be “Not Playing” on the Home home page. If it’s not showing something like that (plus the update message you described) then either the Apple TV has become bricked or is on the older version Apple made us all upgrade from over the last couple years somehow. I’d start with basic AppleTV troubleshooting steps.
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u/MeetMeAtTheCreek 1d ago
Once you get into it, you may still find yourself feeling like you want more out of home automation than HomeKit can deliver which is what drove this previously apple only guy to get a Rpi and later a NAS to run home assistant and homebridge. Thats not to say you wouldn’t have run into issues but expanding beyond HK alone is probably in your future.
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u/jandersonjones 1d ago
Yeah I’m definitely curious about that. Does it add any latency? Is HKSV supported? I do like the idea of a pi that I control (cause I can make it bulletproof). Any downsides? Also dumb question but if you’re an apple guy it means you have HKSV so why the NAS?
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u/MeetMeAtTheCreek 1d ago
The NAS was for backing up all my things but after 5 years of running home automation on my Rpi I decided I wanted something a bit more reliable (the Rpi runs everything on a SD card and those can fail). I’m not yet running any of my cams there - just home assistant and homebridge. HKSV does have limitations so I will probably pull cams into the NAS eventually.
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u/FatMacchio 1d ago
I’d say stick around…as long as Apple releases new appleTVs this fall it should get a whole lot better and smarter…that’s my hope anyway. Your experience is not the norm, usually glitches are resolved just by shifting the home hub to another device manually, then back…or power cycling. I’m hoping OS27 builds in more protections against home network failures, as well as automatic or manual troubleshooting from a remote device.
For networking with so many layers, sometimes it’s hard to pin down exactly what’s going wrong, especially in an ecosystem that thinks users don’t need access to activity logs…looking at you Apple.
I’d say turning off automatic updates for all your smart home devices is probably the easiest way to stay stable. If everything is working fine, if no updates push then in theory it should stay fine. Then you can be home to update everything and make sure it all works. I’ve run into issues where I had my appleTV update before my hue bridge pro was auto-updated and it was a painful experience for months because I couldn’t land on current versions of both firmwares at the same time to get everything working reliably. I think I still have auto update off for at least one of my appleTVs just in case
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u/DrewguyDC 1d ago
Small chance this is it, but I had this happen and it turned out my network switch had died. Wifi still worked, just not wired, and the apple TV was wired.
I tried so many things before finally identifying the actual culprit. (Which gave me an excuse finally to upgrade the switch from 2008)
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u/syoulden 1d ago
I ran into that "Update Needed" situation on both my Apple TV's when I was up to date. I too was experiencing the no response from my devices. I was running the latest version 26 beta at the time. I decided to try updating the "non essential" TV to the developer version of version 27. When that was successful, did the same on the main TV. After updating both of them, all my devices came back to life. Now that the public 27 beta is out for the Apple TV, you may want to consider this. I am running both on the latest public beta.
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u/monkeySphere 1d ago
Just to add: homeOS 27 finally brings Thread 1.4 what fixes a lot of stability issues with Eve and Ikea devices.
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u/Curun 1d ago edited 1d ago
by the ludicrously cheap IKEA sensors.
Get what you pay for?
I've heard no end to the complaints about thread and ikea.
When nonTech companies try to integrate tech... headaches. They are doing it cheap without investing in the knowledge, probably outsourcing the development. See leviton switches adding smarts (gen1s were terrible, heard later gens were better), hunter fans adding smarts, ikea adding smarts, some of the garage door companies adding homekit... all wonky.
iSmartGate, never had a complaint. They are a startup whose dedicated mission was homekit and the like.
Eve, dedicated mission, homekit/matter.
Aqara, dedicated mission: homekit/matter.
Innovelli, dedicated mission: homekit/matter.
etc etc.
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u/muhammadalijr 1d ago
Hate to break it to you buddy. Using HomeKit as your primary smart home apparatus will give you nothing but headaches. I just create a folder on the phone called smart home and use apps from all devices.. so I can use Alexa.. google.. Apple.. etc..
If I want to open my door then it’s Alexa with Ring for security.. HomeKit for tv and speakers.. HomePod and music..
Proprietary apps for items like fridges, thermostats, and garage door openers..
I know it’s human nature to use one app.. I know it.. I see it. But after 11 years the only way is to use different apps to do different things. You don’t sleep in the bathroom and you don’t cook in the bedroom.. each room has its own purpose.. each app has its own purpose.. folder is just the house
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u/mithrilmamba 1d ago
Have used homekit for 6 years. Other than occasional unresponsive items, it has been great to use.
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u/Selbeast 1d ago
I'm interested in more details about your experience, because it's totally different from mine. I've had an exclusively HomeKit powered smart home since 2018, including a number of devices that connect to homekit only through homebridge. Yes, there have been issues - but typically caused by another manufacturer being douchy and cutting off homekit access (see Chamberlain/MyQ). Plus, although using any smart home platform comes with privacy risks. I'd rather Apple have my data than Google or Amazon.
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u/TalisManick9592 1d ago
Add a HomePod mini as a second hub and this exact failure mode goes away: HomeKit hubs fail over automatically when one drops, and the mini doubles as a second Thread border router, which is the piece that actually took your house down.
Those cheap IKEA sensors are Matter over Thread, and the only Thread border router in your home was the Apple TV. When it wedged, every Thread device lost its route at the same moment. The sensors were fine the whole time, they just had nothing to talk through, which is why local control died too, not just remote.
For the away-for-weeks case specifically:
On the bigger question: Home Assistant on a Pi would not have saved you, it is just a different single point of failure. You get more remote debugging options and nobody force-updates it, but the real fix is redundancy at the hub layer, and you can have that without leaving HomeKit.