HomeKit config messed up again after turning on "Hey Siri!"

[OCDMacGeek]

I love HomeKit but I am losing hours of my life configuring it. I have over a dozen devices, as an early adopter of the technology. Lutron lights and shades, iHome plugs, and Ecobee thermostats. I have three devices on the same iCloud account, which I can use to theoretically sync and control all the same devices.

I had my entire configuration erased due to a glitch when some of my devices were on iOS nine, and one was on iOS 8. That seemed to create an incompatibility when I used that device, my whole configuration was borked. I reset everything and did it all over again.

I got my new iPhone 6s Plus last Friday, and after restoring from backup it had my configuration and everything was fine. Now, I just turned on hey Siri on my iPhone 6s plus, and immediately my HomeKit configuration is all screwed up again!

Argh!

 

[OCDMacGeek]

Well, I restored from a backup from last night. That returned my HomeKit configuration. Then when I turned on hey Siri, it did not make me do the set up again as it must have saved that on the server. Now my configuration is fine again. I don't know whether anyone else is having such fragile HomeKit issues.

 

[striders]

Just to share:

I have an ecobee3 HomeKit edition and the first time I set it up, everything works. But after I upgraded my 6 Plus to 6S Plus, I can no longer control the thermostat using Siri. So it's a HomeKit issue.

I reset HomeKit, uninstalled the apps and re-did everything. The problem is, the ecobee3 thermostat STILL think it is connected to HomeKit with the "old" HomeKit configuration. When I attempted to search for new device to add to HomeKit using ecobee3 own app (this is how Apple set it up - you must use the 3rd party app), the thermostat couldn't be found.

So yeah, HomeKit is really at its infancy and breaks a lot, just like iCloud Drive when it first came out. I.e. iCloud backup from 3rd party app is slow and error-prone (Google it), no "file-explorer" like app (iOS 9.0 now have it after more than 1 year), etc.

I am actually selling my ecobee3 and going back to Nest, which has been working for years with no problem.