Homekit using excessive amounts of cellular data

Question

Homekit using excessive amounts of cellular data

I am travelling with 10 GB international data. After one day, already 4 GB of this data was used. I know that 700-1000 MB of this were because of videoconferencing and iPhotos, etc. but the remainder seemed excessive. Checking into the Cellular Data Usage, System Services, I found that HomeKit used 2.7 GB data in just one day! While I do have 4 homekit connected cameras, I did not even use the homekit app at all. Does anyone know, what causes this excessive use of cellular data and how to stop it? I would like to be able to use homekit on the go to control the status of my house, but if the data usage is 3+ GB per day, thats not acceptable.

Thanks for any tips how to reduce the amount of cellular data, or maybe thats a bug of iOS 14.0.1 where there's a workaround available,

Markus

iPhone 11 Pro

Posted on Oct 14, 2020 3:40 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 5, 2020 1:56 PM in response to Markus Lachenmeir

I still have this bug, Dec 5 2020. I have iPhone 11, HomePod and AppleTV. I have to turn off Homekit in iCloud every time I leave the house. I have lots of Homekit devices so I turn Homekit iCloud back on at home to use my devices. I’ve been dealing with this for 2 months and updated all my devices. The other thing that stops the data is leaving my AppleTV unplugged. This has been the worst bug I’ve ever dealt with from Apple.

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Answer 2

Oct 26, 2020 5:52 AM in response to Markus Lachenmeir

The problem has solved for me - But I am not able to verify which of the three steps did the trick.

Here's what I have done:

Restored the iPhone with the newest iOS 14.1(instead of just an update),
Updated all Homepods and Apple TVs with the latest iOS 14.1 update

That has done the trick for me. If its the Reset of my phone or the update of all Homekit Hubs to the latest version - I am not sure.

/Markus

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Answer 3

Stevenas

Level 1

4 points

Oct 16, 2020 2:11 PM in response to Markus Lachenmeir

I have had the exact same problem. I turned off location services for home kit and that has helped, but just by a little. Ever since I’ve upgraded to ios14, and then again 14.0.1. It has ran through my cellular data in a couple of days. ( I don’t have unlimited ) my wife and I share a 2gb /month plan and have never gone over. But since ios14 within 3 days I’ve used 100% . I too am looking for a fix.

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Answer 4

JimC95

Level 1

4 points

Oct 22, 2020 1:42 PM in response to Markus Lachenmeir

I have the same issue. I’ve used 9.6 GB of data for HomeKit in the past 12 days, and I don’t have any HomeKit cameras. It’s just used for my Hue lights (about 30), smart locks (2), and sprinkler controller.

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Answer 5

Oct 26, 2020 12:48 AM in response to Markus Lachenmeir

I have tried network reset, removed all apps which use homekit, but data consumption does not stop. This is really annoying. I am getting new iPhone 12 Pro tomorrow and I am thinking about setting it up as brand new device to see, whether this solves the issues than to restore it from old iPhone or from backup... And I plan to contact Apple support if that continues. This looks like very serious bug and Apple must look into it.

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Answer 6

pgn71

Level 1

4 points

Feb 11, 2021 9:09 AM in response to Markus Lachenmeir

I had this issue too. It only started happening after I switched on Settings > Cellular > Wifi Calling (not Wifi Assist).

I noticed my data usage was high and was alarmed to see under Settings > Cellular > System Services that HomeKit had chewed through 2.9GB of cellular data in just 4 days!

It seemed odd that that would be the culprit, but since I hadn't fiddled with any other wifi/cellular settings recently, I switched it off -- and only that, because I wanted to isolate the problem. It's been 3 days now and HomeKit data usage hasn't budged.

For me, this has solved the problem -- bizarrely.

I'm on an iPhone 12 running iOS 14.4, connected to AT&T.

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Answer 7

Stevenas

Level 1

4 points

Oct 26, 2020 11:31 AM in response to Stevenas

UPDATE

I found that under Settings>Apple ID>iCloud.... home kit was turned on. Once I turned that off it worked perfectly. Haven’t gotten a single kb of cellular data used from it since.

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