The IT Nerd

HomeKit users who have been around for a while have had one major complaint about how HomeKit operated. And I outline that complaint here when I covered my HomeKit setup two years ago:

Another thing to point out about home hubs is that if you have more than one, they are used in an “Active/Standby” configuration. As in if you have two home hubs, one is actively controlling everything. But if something happens to it, the second one will take over. 

And:

You can’t choose which HomePod Mini is the one that is the “connected” one. Which seems at first glance to be a #Fail. But what I believe that Apple is doing behind the scenes is picking the home hub with the best reception and performance to the router. I’ve observed that it tends to gravitate towards making the living room Home Pod Mini the connected one. I suspect that’s due to the fact that it is connected to an ASUS mesh WiFi node that is in close proximity (as in two feet away) to the Home Pod Mini in question which has direct access to the Internet. That would make that one the logical choice to be the one that runs the show. The HomePod Mini in the den is physically closer in proximity to the ASUS mesh WiFi node that’s in the den versus the one in the living room. But because the node in the den has to connect to the node in the living room to get out to the Internet, it’s not as good of a choice to be the connected Home Pod Mini as it has to make a extra hop to the Internet that the HomePod in the living room doesn’t have to make. And the one in the bedroom is the worst choice of the three as it is a room away from the ASUS mesh WiFi node in the den which is where it connects to the Internet from. All of that means that its reception isn’t as great as the first two HomePod Mini units on top of the fact that it has to make an extra hop to get to the Internet.

That’s a lot to take in. But let me boil this down for you and tell you why you should care. If you have more than one device that could be a Home Hub, as in a HomePod, HomePod mini, or Apple TV, one of them will get nominated by HomeKit to be the “active” Home Hub. Any others will be on standby in case that one fails. And you can’t define which one is the “active” Home Hub. Here’s a couple of examples of why you might want to do that:

• Let’s say you have a HomePod and an AppleTV that is wired into your network. Seeing as the HomePod is always going to wireless, the AppleTV that is wired will provided better performance for HomeKit. So you should be able to choose that as your “active” Home Hub for that reason.
• Let’s take my use case of four HomePod mini units, all on WiFi. The one that is closest to the WiFi access point that is connected to my Internet connection should be the “active” home hub as that will get better performance to and from the Internet as it will make less hops to get to and from the Internet.

When iOS 18 rolled out yesterday, Apple finally gave you the means to set your own Home Hub. Which to be frank, is long overdue. Here’s how you do that:

NOTE: Your HomePods and AppleTVs need to be running HomePod Software 18 and tvOS 18 respectively.

• Open the Home app on your iPhone that is running iOS 18
• Tap the “hamburger menu” which is the three dots with a circle around them.
• Choose Home Settings
• Choose Home Hubs And Bridges

You’ll be taken to this screen:

Now you’ll note that in my case, the Den HomePod is the active Home Hub. In this case, that HomePod mini needs to connect to the WiFi access point in the den, then use that to get to the WiFi access point in the living room that is connected to my Internet connection. That’s three hops. So I’m going to change it to the one in the Living room by turning off Automatic Selection.

Here’s where Apple could make a minor improvement. The HomePods in the living room are a stereo pair. The one that is the left channel in the stereo pair lives two or three feet above the living room WiFi access point that is connected to my Internet connection. The one that is the right channel in the stereo pair is about seven feet to the right of the first one. That means that the HomePod mini that is the left channel is the “correct” choice to be the “active” Home Hub. Realistically, it likely makes zero difference which one I pick as they both connect to WiFi via the same access point, and they are both on UPS units which will keep them powered in the event of a power outage, and whatever speed difference that the left one has over the right one is likely irrelevant because its so small. Having said that, it would be nice if Apple did identify which was which for those who care about this sort of thing. In any case, I chose the first living room HomePod so that the checkmark was next to it:

You can then hit the back arrow and you’re done. Now I was wondering what would happen if I unplugged both of the HomePods in the living room to simulate them losing power during a power outage, or being disconnected from the Internet. Here’s what I discovered:

First of all I got this notification to let me know that the HomePod that I set as “active” was no longer responding. And to test to see if I could still access my HomeKit devices from outside the home, I turned off WiFi on my iPhone to simulate yours truly being outside the home. I was able to access all my HomeKit devices just fine.

This is further validated by the fact that the “active” HomePod is now the Den HomePod. From here, I plugged in one of the two HomePods, and it turned out that I chose the one that was furthest away from the WiFi access point. So I switched which living room HomePod was active and declared victory.

So, will you be using this functionality? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

This entry was posted on September 17, 2024 at 8:53 am and is filed under Tips with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.