Handoff from iPhone to HomePod stopped working.

Hmm, one would expect that to do it. I presume Bluetooth is enabled on your devices. I've just tested and Handoff is working here with iOS 13.5.1 on my iPhone 11 Pro Max and HomePods running 13.4.6. Does your Wi-Fi router support dual bands, i,e, both 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios? In some cases disabling one band can improve connectivity with HomePod.

tt2

Turingtest 2,

I tried your advice to fix my issue: seems that handoff works BUT on Podcasts the (same ) podcast which plays on the iPhone 11pro and the HomePods (2) are many seconds out of sync. Seems as if the HomePods start playing the podcast from somewhere else??? Have you heard of this problem? Using all up-to-date software....also, could you describe what you mean by 'power cycle' in greater detail? Is that per the HomePod manual/ Home App or something else? Prior to this problem it seemed as if whenever I touched iPhone to HomePod for hand-off the HPod would start playing from my Music collection! Seems as If the Home app is sending conflicting instructions as to source. Again, have you any idea what might be going on? Thanks for any help....

By power cycle I simply mean unplugging the HomePod, waiting about 10 seconds, then plugging it back in again, in lieu of any other method of "rebooting" the device.

As far as I know HomePods will try to play online content directly from source if possible, to save the data going first to your device and then being rebroadcast to the HomePod. This saves wireless bandwidth and power on your portable devices. On the other hand if your computer or device is sending the audio to HomePod there does seem to be a significant delay. I've tired watching video on my computer with HomePod providing the audio, and it is not pleasant. I'd love to be able to use HomePod with GarageBand or Logic. OKish for playback, but you cannot play a keyboard through it with a 2 second delay.

tt2

turningtest2,

Thanks for the prompt reply and explanation. I seem to have fixed my 'source' problem but am not sure how...may have been the phone connected to 'regular' wi-fi instead of 5GHz? Seems to switch back to the lower one even though I have it (the lower freq) set with 'Auto-Join' on off! May have to just tell the phone to forget that network ....

Thanks for the power cycle info....and I agree about the ~x ms sound delay with video....sometimes (esp. when watching foreign and using captions) it doesn't seem to matter while at others it does.

Thanks and stay safe.....

FYI

Your 'smily' shows up as a double question mark (??) in my Apple Mail...don't know why.

Last question: how does one see which channel the HomePod is connected to?

Thanks again....and here's a test smily: 🙂

I don't think one can tell unless you can get the information from your router. HomePod inherits the Wi-Fi credentials that your phone knows when you set it up. Turning off one of the radios in the router is one approach. It may also be possible for you to forget one of the options from the phone and have that pass forward, but I can't say for certain. Worst case you'd need to reset the HomePod to be sure it forgets.

tt2

Have you tried power cycling the HomePod?

tt2

You're welcome. 🙂

tt2

You're welcome. 🙂

Others have noticed that HomePod seems to be better behaved when it only has one radio channel to connect to.

tt2

You're right: the info is in AirPort Utility. Shows mine as 5GHz.