u/Double-Yak9686

I have three Home automations that play music from Apple Music. One is nature sounds to fall asleep to, the other is on wakeup. Since I updated to 26.5, the automations seem to run fine except that the HomePod does not play any music. If I ask Siri explicitly to play a song or an artist, it plays without a problem, so it's not an issue with the Apple Music subscription or network connectivity.

Has anyone else noticed this with their automations? If it's only me, I'll need to investigate what ad changed on my end.

Edit: This seems to be only an issue on my HomePod minis. My OG HomePod appears to not have been affected.

If anyone wants or needs to restore their HomePod minis, you can download the 26.4 firmware from this page. There are also steps for how to restore.

In a previous post I described how I always provide a wired Thread device (bulb or plug) as a support repeater for my battery sensors. My main reason was that it would reduce the power necessary for a battery powered device to ensure it doesn't fall of the network.

That's probably still a valid reason for doing that but I when I watched this video, I learned some more interesting stuff about Thread devices. From analyzing his homemade sensor he sees that it is sending periodic messages to the Thread Border Router to keep its connection to the Thread network alive. Kind of like a heartbeat. If the TBR doesn't receive the message within a specified time (apparently 15s), it terminates the connection. So, it appears that by providing battery powered devices with a wired Thread device, I unintentionally also improved the reliability of this heartbeat.

The next interesting piece of information, is that to extend this heartbeat window, you need Matter 1.4 and Thread 1.4 support. Don't quote me on this, but AFAIK, Ikea is on 1.4, while Apple Home & Google & Amazon are currently on 1.3, with Home Assistant using a beta version of 1.4. So this discrepancy might be part of the connectivity issues, as battery devices would want to use as little power as possible. So by having a version 1.4 battery device routing through a version 1.4 mains powered device, the powered device may also be acting as a buffer.

This may also be the problem when a device tries to connect or reconnect to a Thread network. By default it might try to connect to the TBR that supports the newest version. So if you have multiple brands of TBRs in your home network, each with different Thread and Matter versions, your device might not be attempting to (re)connect to the one you want it to.

Given all the issues people are having, this information might be helpful.

>Edit: start watching at this offset

HomePod stopped playing music in automations in 26.5