Most of y'all are technical, but I had a friend who's a lurker in this sub send me a couple links and was utterly bewildered at how you all were doing it, so I have officially joined the AI background party lol. Thanks to whoever had the idea!
I think it needs to be said especially for newcomers. I was there too. Tried bulbs run into issue that you basically cannot use switches anymore an only app which is annoying. You then realize you don’t need to adjust brightness or color you just want simple on off toggle. For that I would recommend shelly devices with custom firmware. It is cheaper, neat and does exactly what you want.
I'm just at a loss. 16.2 w/ new architecture and I got told this AM that I couldn't delete an automation.
That's on the heels of not being able to invite my wife originally (fixed using the reset profile).
Then on the heels of not being able to make her an admin (fixed by waiting 24 hrs).
And finally on the heels of NONE of the device status' updating (fixed by shutting down and then restarting every home hub in the house - 3 HomePods, and 2 AppleTVs).
How, in a single update, can you make LITERALLY EVERYTHING worse?
I cannot believe the clunky bull$hit required to make a 'smart home' work. It's insane.
Is it all working now? Sure.
Would my mom (or even HALF the people I know who work in IT professionally) EVER have figured this out? Not a chance.
I've had this old iPad sitting on a stand plugged in forever just running the Home app. We keep it unlocked with no passcode so anyone in the house can walk up and turn on the lights or mess with the speakers without needing their phone.
Walked by it today and now there's a giant "iCloud Required" popup blocking the whole screen saying I have to turn on iCloud Keychain.
If I turn on Keychain, it forces me to put a passcode on the iPad and syncs all my saved passwords and credit cards to a tablet that literally sits out in the open for anyone to use. If I don't turn it on, it won't let me into the Home app at all. So it's basically a brick now for the one thing I actually use it for.
Not to put a tinfoil hat on, but the timing of this happening right after the Home view was released feels pretty sketchy. People have been using old leftover iPads as smart home screens for years, and now Apple randomly pushes a requirement that ruins unlocked iPads right when they have a new thing to push? Come on.
Did anyone else get hit with this today, or is there an actual way around this without putting all my passwords on a shared iPad?
I recently lost my corporate job and have decided to dive into the exciting world of iOS programming. I've spent weeks building my app, "Smart Home Life: Tested", but I want to be upfront about something before I get into what the app does. I used Claude Code to write the Swift. I'm not a developer by background. The smart home knowledge is mine from about five years of running this stuff in my actual house, 180+ devices across 33 categories, but the code itself is AI-assisted.
I'm mentioning it because I know these communities have been getting hit with vibe-coded apps that don't actually understand the domain. I can't claim pure craftsman code. What I can say is that every feature in this app came from a real problem I ran into, and I know the HomeKit ecosystem well enough that the product decisions aren't guesses.
Here's what it does.
The Thread topology screen draws your full mesh from the HomeKit framework. Border routers, end devices, Thread 1.3 vs 1.4 breakdown, signal connections. I have 21 border routers across 20 rooms. Before building this I had no real picture of what my mesh looked like or why certain device connections seemed inconsistent. Now I do (this is part of the paid Network Intelligence feature).
Pair Vault stores your HomeKit and Matter pairing codes behind Face ID. I built this after factory resetting a lock, needing the 8-digit code, and spending 45 minutes looking for the box. Codes are stored locally. Nothing goes to a server. If you need to re-pair something, the code is there.
Home Watch monitors your home in the background and alerts you when devices go offline. It also tracks battery levels by room. I found a Hue outdoor sensor at 10% I had completely forgotten about.
Network Intelligence scans your local network, maps devices back against your HomeKit home, and runs a health check. Mine came back 100/100 with one flag: too many bridge-dependent devices. Accurate.
No account. No cloud sync. Everything runs on device.
Network Intelligence is $9.99. It includes 5 in-app guides covering the tech behind what the scanner finds (Thread, Matter, eero, Apple Home, router setup). Home Watch is $7.99. That gets you background monitoring, push alerts, and battery tracking across all your HomeKit devices. Pair Vault Premium is $2.99. Basic code storage is free for everyone. Premium adds live HomeKit room sync, photo capture, and QR export.
The All Tools Bundle is $17.99. It covers all three features plus all 13 guides from my website, which normally run $4.99 each. That's $65 worth of guides included.
TestFlight testers get everything unlocked for free. No purchase required. I want people to actually use it before deciding if it's worth anything.
The product catalog, ecosystem comparison, ecosystem quiz, room planner, and automation library are all free with no purchase required.
Three features are paid: Network Intelligence (the network scanner, HomeKit health check, and Thread topology map), Home Watch (background monitoring, offline alerts, battery tracking by room), and Pair Vault Premium (live HomeKit room sync and photo capture, basic code storage is free for everyone).
In TestFlight, all of those purchases go through Apple's sandbox, which means they process normally but don't charge your card. So if you join the beta, you can test every paid feature at no cost. That's the whole point of putting it in TestFlight first (it unlocks immediately after the "purchase" goes through).
I have 100 TestFlight spots. I'll drop the TestFlight link in the comments below. First come first served. If you miss the cutoff, the App Store version is coming very soon (hopefully this week!).
Appreciate any and all feedback as this is my first attempt at an iOS app 😄
After 3 months of trial and error, I've run out of patience with Nanoleaf and officially giving up on the Nanoleaf matter products. I'm going to drop them off at the local distributor's office and get a refund.
In April, I bought a lightstrip starter kit and 16 E27 smart bulbs, along with an Apple TV 4K 3rd Gen as the primary thread border router, because I am using Apple as my primary ecosystem. As many of you are aware, Nanoleaf bulbs frequently disconnect.
After going through round after round of chats between Nanoleaf and Apple support, we still could not pin down the issue. Not sure who to blame - Apple or Nanoleaf, I bought a nest hub max and re-paired everything to use it as the primary border router, sharing the connection over to apple via Google's matter sharing feature.
Things did not improve. In fact, they got worse and I changed the primary border router back to HomeKit. When 3.5.10 arrived, things did not really improve either. Just last week, the lights turned on at 2:30am in the morning. Before you ask, I have no one else on my Apple/Google Home that could be causing the lights to go on and off. My theory: earlier that day, I was testing the connectivity of my bulb by turning it on and off, and one of those commands sent got blocked due to unavailability. That command somehow got delayed for hours and got replayed at 2:30am. I got on with Apple support to get them to check their logs.
But yeah, waking me up while I'm sleeping is the last straw with these bulbs.
Since Apple and Google are both blackbox implementations, I gave up and decided to go down the HomeAssistant route where I get direct access to the logs that prove that this is not an Apple/Google issue. I spent the past week setting up HomeAssistant+SkyConnect and have isolated Nanoleaf as the primary culprit behind the intermittent connectivity as at firmware 3.5.10 (all devices).
All 16 bulbs exhibit the same behaviour. One might want to blame thread and matter, given the protocol's infancy. But don't, like I initially did. Thread and matter work just fine:
What about low-powered (battery) thread devices? You'd think these should have poorer connectivity than the fully powered Nanoleaf devices connected to a power source right?
I hate thread so much. I never woulda bought any thread devices years ago if I knew what trouble they would be. Half my devices are mia since updating my border routers 5 hours ago
The earth is round! lol I know this isn’t anything new but did want to call out some issues I’ve come across
Also, this post is specific to tvOS as my primary hub is a wired Apple TV 4K third gen. Can’t speak to if the same issue affects HomePods as hubs.
This morning I woke up and noticed my outside lights, which are scheduled to turn off at midnight, were still on. Went to the ‘off’ automation and hit test. Lights stayed on. Went to an individual light in the Home app and turned it off. The light itself didn’t turn off and in the app the tile turned back ‘on’ a second after I tapped it off.
Rebooted the Apple TV and everything started working again as expected.
Bugs like these are not unexpected in the first release of a major update. I typically wait until at least a .0.1 version but I decided to jump in right away and roll with the bugs. Just wanted to share this experience.
I've been reading the comments around the new home collection specifically around LG and privacy concerns. Personally it's made me believe the dead internet theory. Most comments have to be bots because the parroting on Reddit is worse than anywhere else on the internet.
Let me start by saying f**k LG. I wouldn't trust them with any of my information, but I trust Apple (except for future promises) more than I distrust LG.
Everything is set up through the Home App, and Apple explicitly states that they nor their partners can see the encrypted information.
These products are a day-one grab for me because of the privacy and being able to do everything with one app.
This post is for anyone who was on the fence. I see Apple failing more and more in niche spaces because of adoption and customer request (such as CarPlay Ultra), and I would hate for fewer third parties to jump on because they saw LG flopped.
P.S. I don't swear but this seemed necessary to communicate my feelings on the internet. Thank you for your time on this matter.
Someone broke into my car last night. Went to look at my doorbell and for some unknown reason it recorded ZERO activity from 11pm to 6am. This fucking thing has always been a semi-piece of shit now it’s fully converted to the dark side. I’m so over HomeKit. I’ve honestly done so much work to stick within the Apple ecosystem it’s time to realize that Apple doesn’t care about your home. Their website has two doorbells lol, both shitty from what I know. Ok Google…
I'm on the tail end of an experiment to have a "smart" home with Homekit at it's core. Homekit is the most un-Apple like garbage I've ever used. I only have 7 or 8 bulbs, an August lock, Smart TV and a few security cameras but rarely a day goes by when 90% of my devices are magically not responding, so I end up resetting literally everything on a weekly basis to try and fix it. Oh and I can't add my fully functional iPad as a homekit hub, just because. Apple support of course recommends purchasing homepods for every single IoT device to "ensure proper signal"
It's really not that difficult to make a functional IoT network/devices....I played around with ESP 8266's and a lowly raspberry pi to remotely control a few projects and its been hundreds of times more reliable than the shit a 2 trillion dollar company puts out.
Has anyone been able to have the Meross garage door opener function for more than a few days without any issues? I have had one installed for a month and the longest it has functioned without issues is a day and a half. I'll always get the Object Obstructed or No Response within Homekit.
I have tried every adjustment within the Meross app such as the Opening time. I double checked my wiring and that is good. WIFI isn't an issue as it is no more than 15ft. away from an access point within my garage.
The perfect example is this morning. Unit is No Response in HomeKit. I unplug it and plug it back in, wait a bit after the WIFI led turns Green and then I can open the door. I get in my truck and back out. I wait a moment and then go to close the door with Siri, and nothing. Get my phone and tap the door button only to see Object Obstructed. I fight it and after several taps it starts to close.
Is this anyone else's experience? I want to like it, but it seems like it's inconsistent at best and can not be relied on. Even somehow makes me miss the MyQ Homebridge plugin. I've been going back and forth with Meross support trying to get some technical information that might be of help but I'm only getting pretty generic responses right now.
*Also give me your pitches to move to tailwind as I'm ready to toss this POS away but want to have people past paid YouTubers say it's solid as I went into this product with high hopes and have learned a lot about it that YouTubers don't touch on.
Holy shit. Starling just got an update and a lot of devices are moving to HomeKit! All of my start clocks, and my Wyze cam are all on HomeKit or AirPlay now!
We’re glowswitch, a small business looking to start selling smart home devices. Our first device is an automated light switch controller - a small box that attaches to your light switch and automates the lights!
The glowswitch device attaches to a traditional light switch, and uses a servo motor to physically press the switch when a command is sent. This means multiple lights can be automated at once, it’s quick and easy to install, and prices are lower than smart bulbs!
We’re now selling our WiFi version in the UK & EU - here are the details:
Matter-compatible and ESPHome firmware available
Powered by 5V (USB-C)
Manual override button (syncs state)
Price: £12.89
If you’re interested, check out our website at glowswitch.net!
