Homekit hubs appear in multiple homes - with separate networks, making devices not reachable. (homepod minis)

I was able to fix this issue. I'm not sure if my situation is applicable to everyone here, so your mileage may vary.

In my case, home B was set up after home A (in fact - it was created while I was physically at home A - not sure if that matters).

Over time I added home hubs (Apple TVs and HomePods) to Home B. I noticed that Home A only had hubs from Home A. But Home B had all its own hubs, AND every hub from Home A.

The fix was simple - I just re-setup all the hubs in Home A:

• For Apple TVs, I removed them from Home (Settings -> AirPlay and HomeKit -> Room -> Remove From Home). It's worth noting that before doing this, the 'Home Hub' section of the 'AirPlay and HomeKit' menu showed both homes! I also logged out of iCloud (Users and Accounts -> Default User -> Remove User from Apple TV). Then I just re-added my iCloud user as the default user, and used my iPhone to set it up.
• For HomePods, I just removed them from the Home app and set them up again.

In both situations, during setup it would ask me which home and room to associate the device with.

Since doing this, Home B only has the hubs for Home B, and same for Home A.

So again - I'm not sure why the hubs from home A were associated with home B when that home was set up. But setting them up again seems to have fixed it.

Well, after doing as much trouble shooting as i possibly could I contacted apple. The initial tech was not able to help me further and contacted a supervisor. The work around i was presented does not solve the problem but is a viable work around if you have a family share program.

If you share your Icloud via family share you are able to have another family member be the main person on the other household home kit. So, the hub for the first house is on one persons homekit and the hub for the other house is on another persons homekit. Just allow admin privileges and all the controls are the same. Worked for me. good luck

I talked to an Apple HomeKit tech and he had no actual clue but he suggested resetting all my HomePods on a Mac or PC. So I did. Resetted them all and only put them back online after all where done. Against my fears all seems to work right now for 3 days already. Seems to make a difference to do a normal reset vs. reset on a computer.

Edit: I still see all HomePods assigned to all Homes but it seems not to affect functionality

I have the same issue. I fixed it by resetting my HomePod. Say you have two homes set up with HomeKit: Home A and Home B. And you also have two HomePods: HomePod A and HomePod B. You set up HomePod A in Home A and HomePod B in Home B.

Now you add bulb A. And the Bulb A is in Home A and when you set up Bulb A, your iPhone is connected to Home A's Wi-Fi. But, when you add Bulb A, you accidentally selected Home B (!!!). That's when problems arise. Then, in Home B, you will be able to see HomePod A.

Before resetting your HomePod, please double-check there are no devices in the wrong home. To change the home of your device, you have to delete it and reset it. You might need to create a new Home or delete all related accessories to fix this problem.

Also please disable VPN when setup the accessories. And, make sure the Wi-Fi SSID is different for each home.

there were some updates recently to all of the products - I updated the Apple TV only this week and the issue dissapeared! I hope it stays like that, let you know. So please make sure you update the OŚ on each and every Device - Homepod, iPhone, AppleTV.

In the Apple TV setting under "AirPlay and HomeKit" scroll down to the end where there is a menu:

"HUB FOR THE HOME"

In my case,

• Home 1 connected
• Home 2 connected

I click to change to "disconnect it for home 1."

When I go into the Home App for home 1 now, I can still see the hub form home 2, but the status is "disable". 😃

I never seen this menu before, and searching for it on Apple support, does not mention the option.

So now I just have to wait to see if this is the solution.

Ole 🇩🇰

As an update since this post:

I should note that (until today) I had the routers at two of my physical homes configured with the same SSID. At the office the SSID is different. The office is also the only location which didn’t suffer the home hub mixup issue.

I called support this morning from home 2 to see if they had any suggestions. The call was escalated to a “Senior Advisor”, or something along those lines. While they could not provide a solution, they did take extensive notes. At the end of the call we decided that I would ensure the firmware on my router was updated, delete home 2 from the home app, change the SSID on that router so that home 1 and 2 would no longer have the same SSID, recreate home 2, and re-add the accessories. Obviously changing the SSID also meant having to reconnect every wireless device around the house but it was worth a shot. Before beginning any of this I also decided I would remove the two other “residents” from all of the homes.

After I recreated home 2 I reset my apple tv and minis. Added them to the recreated home 2. Once these were established, I began to re-add accessories. Eventually I stopped because I needed to travel to home 1. I drove there (30km ish), was there for 30 minutes or so, checked the home app while I was there - Home Hubs were still showing in their correct homes.

Drove back to home 2, added a few more accessories, then noticed that once again, my Home Hubs from home 2 are now showing in home 1’s hub list again. At the moment home 1 is still “connected” to a home 1 hub and home 2 is still “connected” to a home 2 hub; however, it is a matter of time before one of the homes goes offline.

I called support back just to update the case and spoke to another senior advisor who suggested that I should wait 24 hours between deleting the home from the home app and recreating it so as to allow any residual data to be completely deleted from the cloud from the previous setup.

If your problem is this:

• HomePod Mini in home “A” gets connected to home “B”
• This causes home “B” to loose contact from home “A”

I have a work-around that has worked for me for several weeks:

• Remove the HomePod Mini from any HomeKit homes you have set up
• Remove the HomePod Mini from your AppleID
• Do a factory reset of the HomePod Mini
• Create an additional AppleID that will be used for nothing else
• Log into the new AppleID
• Ensure you are connected to your normal WiFi network
• Set up the HomePod Mini as you normally would.  Note that it will want to connect to a HomeKit home.  Since you are on a new AppleID, it will create a new HomeKit home for you with nothing else in it but the HomePod Mini.
• Log out of the new AppleID and back into your main AppleID.

Your HomePod Mini will no longer show up as Apple devices under your AppleID.  It will not show up as a hub in any of your HomeKit homes.  This is the downside. The HomePod Mini will no longer be able to be used as a hub and will not serve as a fallback hub for HomeKit.

Your HomePod Mini will show up on your network as an AirPlay device that you can use to stream music.

Your HomePod Mini will also work as a Siri device

I had a call this morning with Apple to try and help escalate the problem as these discussions do not seem to be read. And they gave me a solution and also an explanation for the problem, at least in my configuration.

My Home A hub is a HomePod, my Home B an AppleTV. The HomePod acts like a bully and remain connected when it should not or rather, my AppleTV does not take the lead when I am in Home B.

The problem seems to be related to the fact that my AppleTV is connected through Ethernet and not Wifi. Although on the same network, she is not recognised as being the closest hub. We disconnected the Ethernet cable and immediately, everything turned normal. Even reconnecting it afterwards did not cause the previously noted problem. We'll see how long this works.

This also leaves a number of questions unanswered: If Homekit knows my location and displays it by changing Home automatically and displaying the little arrow to confirm it, why does the system rely on another mechanism (same Wifi network) to activate the right hub ?

There is definitely a fault here but I sensed from my discussion that it will be difficult to get Apple to acknowledge it.

Hope this helps some of you.

This issue has now been completely resolved for me after the new Apple Home structure was implemented (after each hub was updated to 16.2.) Now only one hub per home (the one within each individual home) is available and connected & all devices work within each home!

I MAY HAVE FOUND A TEMPORARY SOLUTION!

so not sure if this will work for everybody or not... but i was having this same issue!

(hub from a different home being connected as the main hub in my house, so nothing was working in HomeKit here)

I went on one of my Apple TV's...

Settings > AirPlay and HomeKit

and scrolled down to Home Hub

and I just clicked on it and it changed from "Connected" to "Disconnected"

I waited 5 seconds, then clicked again so it went back to "Connected"

Then I opened my HOME app on my phone and everything was working again.

That somehow made the Apple TV that I changed to be my main "Connected" hub...

Seems too good to be true, but it worked for me.. at least for now.

Strangely, in my list of Home Hubs for this house, the wrong one (from my other house) is still listed,

but it's on "Standby" ... I'll keep you updated if it switches back.

NOTE: I do however have someone staying in my other house right now.

Not sure if that "activity" on the other Apple TV (which is the hub there)

is somehow causing this to happen. I've never had a problem with this before,

so it's weird. But thought it was worth mentioning. Maybe even a power outage/blink

in the other homes can cause a restart and somehow cause the other hubs to

take over as the main?? (thinking out loud)

Happens to me about once a month, mostly when I have a power surge, then house A starts to use the HomePod in House B. Then 70% of my sensors, cameras do not work. The only fix I found so far is to disconnect the internet from House A (while keeping the WIFI working) for about 10/15 minutes, that leaves enough times for the HomePods/Apple TV to get their act together and run house A again. Then turn the internet and all is well for a while.

Weird thing it only happens to House A (that has the most HomeKit stuff). House B never falls under House A control.

Both houses are about 1,000 Miles apart and using different ISP’s.

I have three homes in homekit and have been able to predict what will happen by watching them. Home A and Home B are on the same physical network (it is a two family house), with logitech doorbells for each home. I had to split into Home A and Home B to make the doorbells work. Home A and B both have Apple TVs and Home Pod minis in them. Home C is in a different location and network and just has an AppleTV In it.

Here is what I learned. Each Home in Homekit requires a master hub. You can see which is the master hub by seeing which Home Hub/Bridge is connected in the Edit Homes setting.

As other users have noted, you can disable the AppleTV being part of a home in the AppleTV menu. But you can't disable a HomePod being part of a home. So what happens is that Homekit randomly assigns one of the pods or AppleTVs as the master hub based more on your Apple ID I think than the home. So in my case of Home A and Home B, I could have a Home Pod Mini in House A as the master pod for Home B. I know when this happens since my doorbell for unit B stops ringing in unit B (another issue for another day -- but logitech doorbells are tempermental)

What causes Homekit to randomly move the masterhub? I am not sure. But if I unplug a HomepodMini that is the current master hub, homekit will eventually migrate over the master hub to a different homepod mini/AppleTV. I unplugged Homepod Minis until I got the master Hub for Unit A to be the apple TV in Unit A, and the master hub for Unit B to be the appleTV in unit B.

So I suspect if your desire master hub for a home goes offline due to power or maybe even an upgrade, you have a chance that the masterhub for your home will migrate to a different pod/AppleTV and that POD could be outside your home.

Now let's talk home C. Home C is in a different town. When I turned on the AppleTV there, guess what, it made itself the masterhub for one of the homes in the different town. So I had to physically go there and disable the other homes in the AppleTV in home C. A lot of users have reported on this.

I haven't tried this, but based on what other people are saying, it sounds like if I were to install a homepod mini in Home C, there is chance it could become the master hub for Home A or Home B somewhat randomly. That would be a problem as now nothing would be reachable.

I like how Apple is making this system so resilient, but the boundaries for resiliency should be the defined pods/TVs in a home, not someones Apple ID.

I finally was able to go to my House B, I added a HomePod mini and noticed it did not show in My house A hubs.

So I removed the HomePods from home B then re-added them I did that one by one. the good news is I did not loose any setup, and now House A has shows the correct hubs, and House B shows it’s correct hubs as well.

So for now so far so good. But it’s only been a couple of days so who knows if that will change.

i just talked to apple support. they're aware if the problem. to speed a fix up you'all should call them (i used the support app ob the iphone). they have a internal voting system for fixes. more votes=higher priority