HomeKit Home app shows all accessories as not responding

[DominikHoffmann]

I am wondering, whether I am the only one dealing with this:

I have had this off and on over the past six weeks at least. Sometimes they call come back spontaneously without any obvious correlation with another event in my environment. Sometimes it helps to reboot my Apple TVs (which act as Home hubs), but I am wondering, whether I killed my Home app for good, when I restored both my Apple TVs to factory settings and set them up from scratch (using settings transferred from my iPhone during the setup process).

Maybe it’s the HomePods mini, which started acting up first, by refusing to executed commands like, “Hey Siri, turn on the basement lights!” This is a real problem, as one of our cars does not have a garage door opener inside and relies on the drive or a passenger opening and closing the garage door with a “Hey Siri” command.

All accessories work with their individual apps: IKEA Home Smart, Lutron Caseta, Chamberlain myQ. So it’s not a network thing. It’s a HomeKit thing, for sure. The HomePods mini also have been reset to factory settings and set up from scratch, multiple times.

Is anyone else experiencing something similar? My money is on a bug in a recent update to tvOS or HomePodOS, or whatever it‘s called. AppleCare advisors don’t know, probably because they haven’t been told by Apple.

 

[dotme]

All accessories work with their individual apps: IKEA Home Smart, Lutron Caseta, Chamberlain myQ. So it’s not a network thing

Not necessarily. Those apps use the Cloud. As long as the controlled accessory, and the mfr app, can both see the Internet, they'll talk.

HomeKit requires the accessory and the HomeKit hub to see each other (on the LAN - Peer to Peer) and that's the difference between the Home app and manufacturer apps.

If you're at home and are seeing "No Response" on all accessories, chances are either it's an issue with the local network not passing mDNS or you have a HomeKit hub problem. Rebooting WiFi Access Points may fix it.

If not, when you hit the three dots on the top-right of the Home app and look at Home Settings - Home Hubs and Bridges, do you see your recently restored Apple TVs in the list of HomeKit hubs? Also, are there any "Phantom" hubs in that list that don't actually exist any more?

 

[DominikHoffmann]

HomeKit requires the accessory and the HomeKit hub to see each other (on the LAN - Peer to Peer) and that's the difference between the Home app and manufacturer apps.

If you're at home and are seeing "No Response" on all accessories, chances are either it's an issue with the local network not passing mDNS or you have a HomeKit hub problem. Rebooting WiFi Access Points may fix it.

I turned on mDNS across the two subnets, and, Bingo!, everything started working as expect. It does beg the question, why it was working intermittently without that, actually a greater percentage of the time than it was not working.

 

[DominikHoffmann]

Also, are there any "Phantom" hubs in that list that don't actually exist any more?

Yes, there is one. While this doesn’t seem a problem, now that Avahi came to the rescue, I would still like to know how to remove it.

It is really the same as a another one in the list, which is in there both with its current name and its old name.

 

[dotme]

I wonder if it worked sometimes because it assumed you were "out of home" and using iOS device > iCloud > Hub like it would if you were outside the network. Apple hasn't been great with documentation on a lot of this stuff IMHO.

If you have a phantom hub, hopefully it'll drop off by itself but I had one that didn't go away and one morning all other hubs were in "Standby" status, leaving me with an unresponsive home. It was a 90 minute procedure to get rid of that ghost hub but once I deleted it, things went back to normal.

Anyway, happy to hear that your mDNS change seems to have everything back up again.

 

[DominikHoffmann]

It was a 90 minute procedure to get rid of that ghost hub but once I deleted it, things went back to normal.

Do you recall at all, how you got it deleted?

 

[dotme]

Do you recall at all, how you got it deleted?

Yes I do - it wasn't fun. I had to go nuclear on the offending hub, deleting it completely and also waiting a couple of times for iCloud propagation.

I suspect ghost hubs can appear for several reasons but in my case, I had an Apple TV that somehow replicated itself, one called "Room Name AppleTV" and another called "Room Name (2)" or something like that - They were in fact the same device. I suspect it may have happened when I either renamed it, or reset it and set it back up without waiting long enough for iCloud to sync first.

Anyway, I can't promise success but I performed the steps below out of desperation to get my accessories to respond again, and I was able to remove my ghost. I hope it helps you too, if you decide to give it a try.

• On the problem Apple TV, I went to Settings > System > Reset and chose Reset and Update. Took a while. I waited for it to finish then powered it off.
• Next, in the Home App on the iPhone, I removed it from the room that it was in, effectively deleting it as an accessory in the home.
• Next, I went to Settings > Apple ID on the iPhone, found the Apple TV on my iCloud device list and deleted it.
• I then walked away for a full 60 mins to allow iCloud to do whatever it does propagation-wise because I wanted to make sure all my other hubs and iOS devices knew about the removal. I may have restarted them all too - I don't remember, but I think that would probably be a good idea.
• After that one hour wait, I restarted my iPhone and then checked the Home app Settings > Home Hubs and Bridges. Both the real Apple TV and the phantom one had disappeared from the list of HomeKit hubs.
• Finally, I powered up the Apple TV and set it back up again. It's been 3 months now and so far the phantom hub has not returned.