I’ve setup a new home for a friend but it’s HomePod mini only so it can’t keep up with all the camera feeds so timelines have lots of ‘?’ Over the clips which is fine and expected behaviour.

But there seems to be a bug in which we’re getting spammed with generic camera motion notifications even though the cameras are set to only record and notify for people and pets as well as the cameras ignoring motion zones.

After digging around I found this Apple Community thread describing basically the exact same issue:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255849824?sortBy=rank

Has anyone else experienced this?

I don’t want to have to add another hub as it seems like a bug.

The short of it:

- I have two Homes (one for my office, one for the rest of the house); both run on HomePod Minis.
- One Mini bricked yesterday. Don’t want to buy a replacement right now because the new ones are on the horizon.

Is there a way to merge the two homes together? Or do I really have to manually move each device (and automation) to the other Home? 😭

Hi, I've upgraded our Apple TV 4K (2nd gen) for the newer Apple TV 4K (3rd gen) because the old one will move to a new (off-site) location.

The Apple TV is my only home hub and my only Thread border router. For a brief moment, there were two (I only disconnected the old one. I only removed it from Home later).

I've set up the new Apple TV with the iOS link, and I've opted for unified homescreen and therefore the new Apple TV was instantly set up the same way as the old one. Incredibly easy, fast and no-nonsense. 10/10 experience. HOWEVER.

Immediately I was greeted with issues in Apple Home. The iPad said "Home hub not responding", referring to the old one. New one didn't show up. Long story short I was able to resolve that by removing the old Apple TV (via the room tile) and a variety of reboots, so I'm committed to the swap now.

The second issue is a bit of a headscratcher- I've got a selection of Matter over Thread devices in my home (smart locks and various IKEA devices), that are all mentioning "no response".

I tried restarting them (eg. pull out the batteries), re-adding them, and I've allowed for over 90 minutes of wait-and-see to see if the network would rebuild, more reboots,...nothing.

Anybody else that has observed this behavior or anybody that has any tips or ideas for what I should try? Swapping a Home hub should be pretty straightforward no?

As a sidenote, I recently had issues adding new MoT devices with my iPhone. They would all just time-out during the initial handshake process.. Never figured it out, but the workaround has been to use the iPad.

P.S. I'm using Tailscale on all devices but that hasn't been an issue before AFAIK. I've tried disabling it today with no effect.

Thank you!!

EDIT:
Update: Thanks to help from Prestigious_Money361 I'm fixing the issue by (painstakingly) factory resetting all my Matter devices so they can be re-added (and reconfigured..). This is the only thing that seems to work. Luckily I'm still about 95% Zigbee device count wise,...yikes.

Finally, my camera recordings are working again after the tvOS 26.5 update.

I have had issues with my Eufy cameras connected to HomeKit Secure Video for probably close to a year. The cameras are set up to record to iCloud, but for the last year it has been completely random whether events were actually saved or not.

After updating to tvOS 26.5, everything suddenly works perfectly again. People, animals, and motion are detected, notifications are coming through, and recordings are being saved to iCloud exactly like they should.

For the past year it has been a total lottery whether anything was recorded, so this is a pretty big relief.

Edit: I have an Apple TV 4K 1st generation as my HomeKit hub.

This might not be news to some folks but I read in iOS 27 "Apple Intelligence" will be able to build Shortcuts using natural language AI and prompts.

I don't know how many times I've read posts with folks wanting to have a very specific automation and bumping into a wall with Homekit tools.

"You can't do that in Homekit but it's easy if you build a Shortcut" Right. Easy if that's what you're into, baffling if you're not. What a great application of AI !. God love you folks that 'bake from scratch' but a lot of us don't have the time/motivation/smarts to do that ourselves.

A whole lot of AI stuff is jive, but in this case (and if it works) it's hard not to see the practicality. Seems like it would be a significant selling point for Apple and their HA space.

I'll be watching this closely.

My husband is hopeless at remembering to lock the front door, also he is hopeless when it comes to checking his phone, so we installed the Yale Assure lock and the Homekit on our apple TV. I have an automation so that the door is supposed to lock when the last one leaves home (which is usually him). It hasn't been working, then I realized it's because it sends him a notification, which he doesn't see. Grrr. Is there a way either I can get the notification or for it to go to both of us when the last person leaves home? Or a way the door can lock without a notification at all?

Hi, I just bought an Aqara Camera Hub G350 and I’m trying to understand how to automate the physical lens retract/privacy behavior.

Please: G350 only, not G3/E1 examples.

My setup:
G350 added first in the Aqara app
Then added to Apple HomeKit through the Aqara app
Aqara hub also added to Apple Home as a Matter hub

What I want:
When someone arrives home → lenses physically retract/tilt away
When everyone leaves → camera turns back on

Inside the G350 scene/automation UI, I did NOT find any dedicated action such as:
Privacy On
Privacy Protection
Privacy Mode
Sleep
lens retract/barrier action

The only relevant Aqara scene action I found is:
Turn off camera for Camera Hub G350

So my current assumption is that the physical lens retract/privacy behavior is tied to Turn off camera.

I created Aqara scenes:
Camera Off → Turn off camera
Camera On → Turn on camera

Then I exported those scenes to Apple Home and plan to trigger them from Apple Home automations.

My questions:
- Is Turn off camera actually the intended way to trigger the G350 physical lens retract/privacy behavior?
- Should I only trigger the exported Aqara scenes from Apple Home?
- Should I avoid using the separate HomeKit accessory state like System Off?
- Are Aqara state and HomeKit/HKSV state separate/asynchronous on this camera?

- Has anyone validated this exact setup on the G350? Or any useful tips on this?

Thanks guys!

his is less Tony Stark and more tired adult with crumbs, but I think I finally found a robot vacuum schedule that makes the house feel clean without making it feel like a robot is hunting me. Kitchen and dining area at 9:20 after breakfast, entryway at 3:30 because shoes are apparently soil delivery devices, full main floor Mon Wed Fri only when everyone is away, bedrooms never after 8 pm, and a quiet “cat litter perimeter” run before the evening scene turns on. The weird part is that fewer runs made the place feel cleaner because I stopped getting annoyed and canceling it halfway. I also set it to skip if someone is home sick or the TV scene is active, because nothing ruins a movie like a determined little puck eating popcorn under your feet.

For people using HomeKit shortcuts or presence stuff, what’s your version of a clean-feeling home schedule? More tiny runs, fewer deeper runs, or chaos mode and let it figure life out?

I have an ikea plug that I want to use with various battery chargers. I’d like the plug to automatically turn off after three or so hours after it’s turned on by any means. Is this possible inside the home app?

I need some hive mind help.

I just moved and decided to ditch Google/Net and go full HomeKit since Google keeps discontinuing all the Nest products.

The one thing I cannot resolve is my indoor cameras. I bought the Aqara G100, and while it works fine I get notifications every 3 minutes even though I have set it to only notify when I’m not home and only notify when animals are detected… but everything triggers it - motion on the TV, people, shadows from trees outside, lights turning on/off … Last night I was gone just under 2 hours and received 36 notifications! it’s too much

Home app also doesn’t seem to allow me to view the event history… and tbh if I wanted to have a separate app for my camera I would have just kept my Nest cams as they have been great for many years.

The only thing I need is barking notifications… Mom’s 2yr old dachshund is pissing off the entire HOA and I need to know when she’s on a barking spree.

Can you all recommend a reliable indoor camera with native HomeKit functionality and reliable sound trigger notifications? This is for my 75yr old mom so workarounds via desktop software are not an option for this.

Thanks in advance for the help!

A few years ago I had my Ecobee setup perfect that when everyone left the house Homekit would kick my thermostat into away mode. It seems somewhere along the line Away mode no longer works and I have been just using Heat/AC at a manual temp when people leave the house as a temporary "band aid".

Lately we in my area we have been back and forth with hot/cold days. Yesterday I accidently heated my house to 76 because my heat was still on vs AC.

My question, is there ANY way to utilize the away function in Homekit?

Hi all. I’ve got a number of Onvis smart switches in my home using matter over thread. When the battery died and I put a new one in it never re-appears. So in the end after leaving it a day or so I rescanned the code and tried to re-add it. It appears but as a new switch, with the same “old” switch present still and missing from the network. Only way going in and out the old switch settings, looking at each buttons function and going in and out the new switch and manually reprogramming all the lights or automations. These have 5 buttons with single, double or long press functions on each so is a real pain.

I’ve now had to do this on a second one when the battery died in that too. This seems like madness! Is there a simple way to make the device just re-appear as the same thing after changing the battery? Or to make it become the same device after re-pairing it? Or duplicate all device settings of the old “missing” switch and copy to the “new” one? Even just a way to duplicate a shortcut from a single switch function of the old one and pasting to a button on the new one would at least save some time rather than re-writing if/else statements from scratch!

Surely there’s some other way than re-programming the entire thing from scratch every time the battery dies? The other batteries in the other 3 aren’t gonna last much longer and then I’m in for re-coding 45 more switch functions again! 🤦🏻‍♂️

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 😄

Thanks,
Anthony - Smart Home Life LLC
https://smarthomelifellc.com/

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I was shopping yesterday for maybe 2 more meross lights and managed to reconnect another one i had laying around yesterday, with plenty of troubleshooting. Today that one light wont turn on with the correct scene color. Then today, after a year of the kitchen lights working fine, 2 of 3 on a light went unresponsive but still turn on. I tried resetting, 2.4ghz. They wont reconnect. Do yourself a favour, never buy Meross lights.

The G400 PoE doorbell has finally landed in Australia so I jumped on the launch offer straight away.

It arrived a few days ago, and I have got it installed and thought I’d share my experience in the hope that it helps others, and see if others can help me.

My first issue was network connectivity. I have a Cisco 48 port PoE switch which does not play well with Aqara products. To get my G5 Pro PoE cameras to work, I had to manually set the ports to 10Mb half duplex, or the cameras would not connect to the network. When I tried to connect the G400 doorbell, of course it did not work out of the box. I manually set the ports to 10Mb half duplex, but it still wouldn’t connect. After a bit of research, someone mentioned problems with STP. I changed the STP setting for the port to Edge and it finally connected to the network.

I then paired the doorbell with the Aqara app which was fairly painless. When I pressed the doorbell button, it would automatically come to the phone call as an audio call. There was no video attached which was a bit disappointing. I thought that maybe the HomeKit would work better. When I tried to add the G400 to my Apple Home app, it would not work. Eventually as a last resort, I reset the G400 by holding the reset button for 10 seconds. This allowed the Home app to add it immediately, but it was then gone from the Aqara app - I guess you can only have one or the other, not both.

Now, when I press the doorbell, I get a notification that the button has been pressed, which I need to tap on. This then brings up the camera and I need to press talk to respond. I’d prefer it to come up as a call like it did in the Aqara app. Is that possible?

Recently got cameras installed and connected to HomeKit so I turned notifications on but they won’t show on Apple Watch, only my iPhone. Both devices are up to date on software. iPhone 16 pro max and Apple Watch Series 6 if that helps.

I have aqara hub and quick switches in a few rooms but I dont like how they only allow single press, double and long hold. Was hoping for something better like with on/off and dimmer functions perhaps. Like tap on and if off then off instead of single and double click etc.

Are the hue dimmers the only solutions?

The speaker is priced at US$299, subwoofer - US$899, and Soundbar - US$1099. All are available in either black or ‘white smoke’, with the speaker also available in an additional colour - driftwood sand’ for an additional US$50.