I’ve bought into the Apple HomeKit ecosystem, paying premium for all the devices involved, hoping that Apples costly certification process filters out the junk, but no: it’s the same crap.
Devices are “Updating…” for minutes when I want to switch them on. Once a month something gets stuck as “Not responding” and I have to delete it, re-add it, and redo from scratch all it’s configuration and automations.
I’ve tried Thread that was meant to fix the issues of Wi-Fi devices, but the Thread bulbs are the least reliable ones I have.
It’s all awful, and I’m an idiot sitting in the dark listening to Siri making excuses.
HomeKit is terrible when it comes to handling your device’s network disconnecting/reconnecting.
When I arrive home it sometimes takes a few tries before HomeKit realises that I’m back on the network and starts working.
I’m frankly not sure WTF is going on, the bridge is on a static IP so it doesn’t even have to do the whole Bonjour/ZeroConf discovery and can just hit the latest IP it saw the bridge at.
Fortunately my main automation is via Home Assistant and HomeKit is only used as a UI, so if HomeKit craps out I just fire up the Home Assistant web interface or toggle the WiFi a couple times.
But if you were looking at HomeKit for a sign of quality I’m not sure it’s a good idea. The protocol is unnecessarily complex - it’s good in that it’s somewhat documented and open-source gateways such as Home Assistant can talk to it as a client (so instead of reverse-engineering a proprietary API they can just pretend to be a HomeKit client) but using it to connect directly to your control devices (phone, Mac, etc) is a recipe for disaster.
So if you have HomeKit devices, maybe look into using Home Assistant as a gateway. That way HA is talking to all your devices (so its network situation never changes and hopefully there won’t be problems) and then control your devices from HA or have it present itself as a HomeKit bridge as well - at least your client device will only have to figure out the whole network situation with one bridge instead of all of your devices separately.
Devices are “Updating…” for minutes when I want to switch them on. Once a month something gets stuck as “Not responding” and I have to delete it, re-add it, and redo from scratch all it’s configuration and automations.
I’ve tried Thread that was meant to fix the issues of Wi-Fi devices, but the Thread bulbs are the least reliable ones I have.
It’s all awful, and I’m an idiot sitting in the dark listening to Siri making excuses.