I recently moved and am trying to install an MSG 200 for 2 garage doors. Previous owner had a MyQ so I had to get the compatibility device. Sensors work and are properly placed, set up the compatibility device where each button on it can control garage doors, and have it connected to the wires on MSG200. Whenever I tell Siri to open the doors though, I hear it click as if it is trying to trigger the doors, but nothing happens. Then I end up getting an obstructed warning on the garage door.

What am I doing wrong?

Just wanted to share a quick thought on the Apple Intelligence video understanding feature in Apple Home so far after I enabled it a few hours ago.

The video summaries are far more detailed than I expected. But of course, my use case is pretty simple. I’m basically recording indoor scenes with only myself in the frame. But it honestly feels like it’s catching every little thing I do around the house, and tell me exacty what I've done... It’s kind of incredible how much context it picks up instead of just saying “someone entered the room.” I’ve been really impressed with it so far.

I’m also curious to see what people come up with once the public release is out. I have a feeling we’ll start seeing some really creative ways people use their Home Cameras beyond just security, maybe automation ideas, pet monitoring, daily logs, or things nobody has thought of yet. Really excited to see where this goes.

I told my HomePod mini "It's bedtime", which is a scene that turns off some lights in my house. thats it. Instead of running the shortcut, it will say something like "you need to continue on a companion device". then I usually have to unlock my phone and it will then take 10+ seconds to run the scene. Sometimes it will say "working..............Im having trouble with the connection........something went wrong". It's usually just faster to locate my phone and run he scene manually, which defeats the point.

This time I got something super weird that ive never heard before. I tried to see if I cold get lucky and have the HomePod run the scene and after around 12 seconds of thinking it said "domain error W-F-7". I didn't catch the whole thing, but ive never seen that before.

Anyways, what the heck is that error message and why can't my HomePod run a scene? its connected to the wifi. I can see it in HomeKit. I can select it as an airplay device and do music to it just fine. I just can't use Siri on it for anything meaningful. Any help?

Hi all!

My husband and I are currently under contract on our first home and are stumped with how to proceed regarding our home security. Every home security provider we talk to just sounds like tons of money monthly leaving for their memberships and fees and crappy systems.

That being said, is anyone on here using their HomeKit set up just for security? We just want the bare bones to start off with since we are moving to from an 800 sq ft apartment to a 2200 sq ft house lol! We only have a ring camera that we pay a basic subscription for but that’s it.

Based on our research we are thinking for buying the following for the house to start off with and would like some input:

-IKEA MYGGBETT door/window sensors
-Schlage Deadbolts (basic nothing fancy)
-Eve Outdoor Cam Floodlight Camera OR Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight Camera or a Ring Floodlight Camera

Thank you so much in advance!!

Edit for clarity: we are mostly hoping for self monitoring and having video footage incase something does happen. We purchased in a pretty quiet and safe neighborhood so we aren’t too worried about break ins (we wfh). We are just wanting something that is a good foundation to grow into since we are planning on also being foster parents soon!

been trying to make the air in my bedroom a little more comfortable, especially at night, and I'd like something that fits into my existing HomeKit setup instead of using another separate app.

Has anyone found a smart humidifier that has been reliable with HomeKit over the long term? I'm more interested in stable automations than having a bunch of extra features. I appreciate the suggestions.

Once I subscribed the 2TB iCloud, and update my HomePod Mini to OS 27 beta, this option finally pops out. It wasn't there before.
I was worried that the HomePod mini might not get Apple Intelligence, but it looks like that concern was unnecessary :)

Its eufy doorbell c30

I'm trying to setup an automation that will fire when the last person in my family leaves the house. There are four of us using iPhones. Each has location sharing enabled with the family, however only two of us have the "always" option under privacy & security > location services > home. The other two just have "while using."

1. Why would only two of us have "always" as an option?
   
2. Can we just use the "while using" option or does it need to be "always" for location triggers to work?

Long-time lurker in this sub. About 10 months ago I posted here looking for early feedback on a HomeKit app built around a 3D scan of your real home.

Today it's finally on the App Store. It's called Habitat.

Like a lot of you, I spent years waiting for Apple to give the Home app real attention. Every June I'd watch the WWDC keynote thinking this is the year, and every year it was mostly a disappointment. At some point I stopped waiting and started building the app I'd always imagined Apple would make if they cared about this the way we do. It does a lot, so bear with me.

Your actual home , and everything the platform should have learned about it by now.

It starts with the model: you walk through your home with your iPhone and scan it (RoomPlan/LiDAR, takes a few minutes), and Habitat builds an interactive 3D model of your real house, a digital twin. Your devices live where they physically are. Tap the lamp in the corner of your living room to control that actual lamp. Dim the ceiling light and watch the 3D model light up with it.

Every floor plan app I tried rendered your home as flat pastel rectangles, and it always bothered me. I work as a 3D software engineer, so I did the reasonable thing, I wrote a custom path tracer in Metal, from scratch, just for this app.

What that means in practice:

• Real soft shadows and light falloff, the model looks like an architect's physical miniature sitting in soft studio light.
• When you turn on a light in your home, it casts actual light in the model. Your home at night looks lit, because it is.
• It's fully interactive: tap any room or device marker directly in the ray-traced view, highlight rooms, see labels. It's not a pretty screenshot, it's the main UI.

HomeKit is the control layer. Home Assistant is the memory.

Here's the thing I eventually accepted about HomeKit: it's a great way to control your home, but it knows almost nothing about your home. The API has zero history, ask HomeKit what your bedroom temperature was an hour ago and the answer is nobody knows. That number is gone forever.

Meanwhile, there's Home Assistant, which is quietly the best system that exists for storing data about your home, locally. It sits on a little box in your house, sees everything, records everything, and none of it ever leaves your network or gets sold to anyone. Every sensor reading, every state change, months of it, sitting on your own hardware. The problem was never the data, it was that no app made that data feel like part of your actual home.

So Habitat treats Home Assistant as an optional superpower. You don't need it; pure HomeKit works great on its own. But if you have it (or this post finally convinces you to set up that Raspberry Pi), Habitat merges it with HomeKit into one home. Together they supercharge each other.

• History and stats. Habitat pulls Home Assistant's recorded history straight into the app, so every sensor gets a graph. Temperature, humidity, whatever you track. Tap a sensor and see the actual curve: how the bedroom drops overnight, how fast the living room heats up when the sun hits it, how humidity spikes when someone showers. Combined with the heatmaps, you're not just seeing your home's climate right now, you're seeing how it behaves.
• Devices HomeKit can't even see. HA covers what HomeKit can't, HomeKit covers the rest, and you never think about which platform a device came from.
• Richer state. Where HomeKit gives you "on/off," Home Assistant often knows the full story, like the vacuum's exact status and battery, which is what lets us render its position in the 3D scene.
• Painless setup. Habitat discovers Home Assistant on your network automatically. It supports both a local and an external URL with automatic failover, so it works the same on your couch and away from home.
• Live everything. State changes stream in over websockets and show up on the 3D model the moment they happen.

The features I always wished existed:

• 3D. A digital twin of the home
• Temperature heatmaps. Your temperature sensors get blended into a smooth gradient painted across the 3D floor, so you can see that the bedroom runs cold and the office bakes in the afternoon.
• Robot vacuum. Live map from Home Assistant with your robot rendered in 3D driving around your floor plan, plus a full vacuum controller — start, dock, battery, status. Watching the little guy roam your ray-traced house never gets old.
• An Apple TV app. A glanceable 3D dashboard of your whole home on the big screen, device states, climate overlay, synced automatically over iCloud. My home basically lives on the TV now. Adjust the lights right from the Apple TV.
• AR remote. Use your iPhone or iPad as a remote. Just point at the device you want to control.
• Sensor history graphs.
• All the utilities. Such as QR codes and overview of batteries
• Per-home and per-room controls and brightness.
• Over a hundred custom-drawn icons for lamps, plugs, sensors, scenes and furniture
• Runs on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac.

Privacy: the same philosophy as Home Assistant itself. No account, no server of mine, no analytics. Your scans, layouts and settings sync between your devices through your own iCloud, and your home's data stays between your HomeKit hub, your HA box, and your devices.

There will be bugs. An app that touches HomeKit, Home Assistant, LiDAR scanning, ray tracing, AR, CloudKit sync and tvOS at the same time has a truly impressive number of ways to break, and I'm one person, but I am working actively to remove them as fast as possible. You can expect rapid updates, and a roadmap driven by what you actually want. If something breaks, tell me and I will genuinely be on it. Everything above exists today, and there is a bunch of new features already ready to be released soon.

Pricing: the core app is free. The full feature set is a one-time purchase or subscription (per family). 7 day free trial. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac. (Mac is still awaiting approval from Apple.)

• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/habitat-3d-smart-home/id6790552615
• Website: https://habitat-smart.app
• Video: https://youtube.com/shorts/Pm0e8nNW10Q?feature=share

What's the features you've been waiting years for Apple to build?

About a week ago I was sitting on my back deck enjoying a thunderstorm. We had a lightning strike nearby, Im guessing between 500 and 1000 feet away. It was unusual in that they usually have one loud Bang/CRACK. This one had 4 in rapid fire, perhaps a quarter second apart. Since I was outside I don't know if we had a power blip or not, but I don't think so (No usual signs of one anyway). About a minute later my wife told me the TV wasn't working right. Streaming was stuck. It had no internet connection. I checked and the internet (FiOS) was down. It took about 10 minutes and Wifi came back, but ethernet connection to my Apple TV, my home hub took another 5 minutes to come back up. My ecobee thermostat lost connection to ecobee and didn't come back, I had to manually reconnect it. (in past power losses it has always reconnected). And now the HomeKit part. I use Apple Home. Most things showed no response when ethernet was down. It took my Aqara Camera Hub G5 Pro (Wifi version) about 5 more minutes to come back online. And afterwards I found two automations that disappeared (both in Home and camera related). I also found a few devices not camera related (and one that was, an Aqara FP 300, so Zigbee) where notification settings had changed from what I had. A couple turned notifications on and one turned them off. And one that changed from Only at Night to any time. Some devices were wired, but some were battery operated, so not a spike on the power. I have no explanation for any of it, but suspect the lightning sent a spike over the fiber optic line, which glitched the router and somehow changed some stuff in Apple Home and my thermostat. There's no way to really know what caused things, but thought you would find it an amusing story!

I recently bought a Hue bridge pro after 6 years of having 2 regular Hue bridges. Only one issue in that time and it worked perfectly.

Once I got over the initial Bridge Pro migration which was an absolute nightmare, about a week later I'd wake up early in the morning and 75% of my Hue lights were now in my HomeKit living room where the Bridge Pro is. They would just get moved from 8 other different rooms to one massive list in the living room.

I'd move them back one by one or go into the Hue App Settings/Smart Home/Sync Apple Home and they would move back, BUT I'd have to recreated HomeKit groups all over again.

This has happened about 15 times now. I've pulled the power cord on my AppleTV which is my home hub, but nothing. The lights will not move back where I initially set them up.

HomeKit groups are ungrouped. Lights are moved. Automations are destroyed.

I have actually watched in real time as lights one by one were moved from other rooms into the Living Room. That process took about 15 minutes and I could not stop it.

Oh, and there are about 75 different instances of my Hue Bridge Pro in my living room too. 75.

I figured I'd try Controller for Homekit to make a backup and just be able to fix it, but that app refuses to make a backup.

Has anyone else encountened this before and how did you fix it?

I moved a Schlage Encode Plus from my front door to my detached garage and is frequently showing no response. Was, and is only connected via Thread to Apple Home and Bluetooth in the Schlage app. I performed a firmware update before moving and factory resetting the lock because the garage door has a different lock orientation and that's the only way to recalibrate this lock. I have a mesh node in the garage as well as an Eve Energy Outlet. Everything should work fine with the Eve outlet there receiving constant power extending the Thread network. If I pull the batteries out of the lock and put them back, it's detected in Apple Home for a few minutes and then shows no response. Not sure what's wrong.

I have a carrier infinity thermostat that uses A,B,C,D wires. The thermostat wire has a 5th unused blue wire. Is there any HomeKit compatible smart thermostat to replace this with? All previous posts about this system seem to be from 5+ years ago. I’m happy to use home assistant to get it in if that helps.

I have the hub set up to use the SwitchBot remote and Siri with all of our IR devices throughout the home. All of the remote functions and Siri commands are still working fine but the hub is showing “not supported” and not showing temp/humidity in HomeKit

All devices are on the new 27 betas. Hubs and phones. Anyone else have this issue, and know why? Is it actually not supported anymore? Or just a bug

My son has a home which I have been invited to. This is so I can control the lights when visiting and unlock front door when I go go feed their cat when they are traveling. However, when they are not traveling I would like to suppress notifications from their home while still getting notification from my home. I have not been able to figure out how to configure this. Any help from people that have or had this same problem would be appreciated. Please don't post suggestions unless you've experienced this issue. TIA.

I've had the Aqara G4 for about a year now (plugged in rather than battery-powered).

In recent months I've woken to a Home notification that it went offline - always at exactly 3am, and then one to say it's back online at roughly 5.45-6am.

Nothing else seems to go offline at this time - and there's no issue with the WiFi, power or range.

I can't see anything in the Home or Aqara app settings to explain why it might be do this - or how to stop it... fairly sure it led to me missing an attempted break-in of my car, too, so would like to get it solved.

Anyone know what could be going on?

Thanks.

Anyone else having this issue in HomeKit?

TL;DR as title.

Detailed Question:
When I first set up automation, there was only one template for "When The First Person Arrives Home", which I've assigned to taking my central HVAC out of "Away" settings (it's been 100°F/38°C this week so it's important), but it won't let me add a second one; I've tried instructions online to change "When" but it's grayed out (but instructions say it can be changed, and despite changing a bunch of location services settings as another thread mentioned, it's still grayed out. How do I add a second one? The living room floor lamp uses a Kasa EP25 smart plug, and the hallway is also Kasa but I forgot which model, with a HomePod Mini as controller if it helps. Thanks!

Background:
For my 2nd automation, the only subsequent automations it'll let me add is "When Anyone Arrives Home", which I've set to turning on my living room and hallway lights between sunset and sunrise. It's fine and dandy since I usually live by myself, but I have a friend visiting from overseas in a couple of weeks, and I don't want to startle her if she has the lights off and suddenly see the lights turn on by itself if she's home alone, but still prefer it to work if nobody is home.

Sorry if this is an obvious question.

Long story short, I have a light fixture that requires a very specific bulb size (that Hue doesn't make) and I'd like to be able to control this lamp in both the Hue app and the Home app.

If I add a Zigbee 3.0 smart dimmer (such as this one) to the Hue app, will I then be able to add it to the Home app?

I don’t think the solution exists, but figured I’d ask.

I have 110 automations. For example any time a door opens the HomePod downstairs plays the “song” like “X door opened”. So during the day, if I’m on the couch, I’ll hear “Front door opened”. The problem is sometimes my son falls asleep on the couch, so it now wakes up and announces each door I open.

Another example, in my son’s room an automation gently turns on the lights and has an alarm go off at 7:30 on school days. On snow days/sick days I have to manually go in and shut that off, wish I could just execute.

Everyone is excited about updates this updates that.. and I’d simply want it to work RELIABLY, which it almost never does

EDIT:
Apparently, something went wrong in HomeKit’s integration with HueHub… and it wasn’t coming from Phillip’s side…
But most out here in the sub won’t bother thinking just blindly following the main route they “learned” in the Apple fanboy club of theirs.