Homekit Automations are broken in iOS 16

I had this same problem. I am running iOS 16.1.2 on my iPhone. I unplugged my two HomePod minis and my AppleTV 4K. Left them all unplugged for five minutes. After the five minutes, I plugged them back into their outlets. That seems to have fixed my timed automations problem. Woke up this morning and my automations were running smoothly.

I don’t know if discussing beta software is allowed in the forums here, but I’ve had a quick skim of the tos and couldn’t see a specific mention of it so 🤷.

Since coming across these issues, i installed the 16.2 beta on my HomePod minis. This seems to have improved things enormously. As anticipated the beta on my iOS / iPadOS devices made no difference at all.

My AppleTV is still on 16.1 (I couldn’t be bothered with the faff of installing the beta on it) but it didn’t seem necessary as it appears the homehub naturally defaults to the devices running the latest software.

So as Apple has just today announced the release candidate of 16.2, I expect the rest of you will all soon see a big improvement.

Yet it fixed my automation issue which is still working perfectly. One MUST remove the hub in order to delete the HomeKit app then reinstall the HomeKit and hub after rebooting the phone. I didn’t tell you to run HomeKit without a hub. As far as automations go, the hub and HomeKit work together.

There are a few reasons a hub is necessary: 

1. Remote access. If you want to access your HomeKit devices remotely, you need a hub. 
2. Automations. If you want other people in your house to be able to run automations, or you want those automations to run when your device is unavailable, you need a hub. 
3. If you want to use Thread devices, you need a hub — but it may not need to be a HomeKit hub 
4. If you want to use BlueTooth devices (not recommended), you may need a hub 
5. If you want to use Zigbee or other protocols (e.g. Lutron ClearConnect), you will need a hub… but it won't be a HomeKit Hub

BTW, iPads cannot be used as hubs with the rollout of IOS 16.

Apple has put a renewed emphasis on HomeKit this year with iOS 16, bringing a completely redesigned Home app ahead of the looming Matter standard launch. One key aspect of HomeKit is having a home hub, which allows for features like out-of-home control, automations, and more. 

Apple has traditionally allowed HomePod, Apple TV, and iPad devices to serve as home hubs. With the release of iOS and iPadOS 16 this year, however, iPads will no longer be supported as home hubs.

So the issue appears to be solely when my AppleTV is the Connected hub. If I unplug the AppleTV so that the HomePod takes over all is good. If I then power up the AppleTV and it is Standby and HomePod remains connected, all works. But if I restart or unplug the HomePod and the AppleTV becomes Connected then ToD automations stop working. The behavior is consistent for me.

Also, fwiw, I did do the Home upgrade (yesterday).

In my case the culprit is a 2017 TV 4K. If yours are different editions of Apple TV you could try to deactivate by model number and see if that improves anything. But essentially, whatever you do, observe if your automations work flawlessly when the HomePod mini is the “connected” hub versus when (any of) the Apple tv is a connected hub. I would try it. My problems all went away by deactivating atv.

I might add the following observations:

• a mix of HomePod 1 and HomePod Mini and Appletv 4K 2017 home hubs seems to cause Thread and Bluetooth instructions to get lost frequently. I dramatically improved thread reliability by placing HomePod mini in the room of my thread devices and moving HomePod 1 out of that room and disabling Appletv as a hub (on 2017 model is possible)
• HomePod 1 needs a very strong wireless connection. At 1 wlan bar out of 3 on my iPhone standing right next to it and able to surf the web HomePod 1 frequently states “I’m having trouble connecting to the internet”. It’s very flaky. Again, I made sure this HomePod is NOT the “connected” hub which dramatically improved automation reliability. Pick a hub with solid internet access.
• Thread devices require a main net powered router in the vicinity to operate properly. I moved one HomePod mini near at least 1 thread device.

I can reproduce all of the above upon request. The worst offender of the 3 is appletv, followed by HomePod 1 and then Thread. I think generally speaking homepod doesn’t route requests to the hub with best connection quality to a device. It seems to try it locally and then is unable to reach. Hence switching to a hub with nearer connectivity has such a dramatic impact. You really wonder how simplistic HomeKit is internally?

After migrating several of my configurations to scenes, I updated my automations to just trigger the scenes, and that seems to work. It stinks because I need two scenes for every configuration--one each for on and off. Hopefully Apple gets the message this is borked. I used their "product feedback" form but if it isn't addressed in the next update, I may have to escalate this to an actual support call just to get the HomeKit team's attention.

I have an HomePod Mini running my HomeKit setup. After iOS 16 auto update my automations stopped working. After a lot of online searching and trial and error here is what worked for me.

Go to the Home app on the iPhone and go to automations. Click on each automation you have set up and turn off ENABLE. I then waited an hour for icloud to update settings. Then turned back on ENABLE from the Home app. Then I power cycled the HomePod mini. All automations are working again. Good luck to yas.

This worked for me. Using my iPhone (iOS 16.0.2) I first took a screen shot of each automation. Then, one by one, I deleted the automation and created a new one using the screen shot as my guide. I tested the new automations by setting a time of day a few minutes ahead and waiting to see what happened. They worked. Then I just set them back to their original time of day settings. All good. FWIW, I have 10 automations and am using an Apple TV 4K as the hub.

Deleting and reinstalling the Home app on my iPhone seem to do the trick for me. I’ve been able to test about 85-90% of all my automations and they are working. Don’t fear. When you reinstall the Home app, your devices and automations will still be there.

After some experimentation I think part of the problem is conflict among apps to control devices - both wifi and hub based. For example, an iHome plug (wifi) which is controllable by Homekit and Alexa stopped working in a Homekit automation. Looking at Alexa it was marked as controlled by the now defunct iHome cloud. Deleting it from Alexa restored automation by Homekit (basically, in newer versions of Homekit -Homekit/Alexa/other hubs appear to interfere with each other in unpredictable ways).

All my automations worked fine after updating to iOS16.01. Don't know about iOS16.02 as I was traveling when I updated. I tried what someone earlier mentioned and went into my AppleTV 4k, Settings, AirPlay and HomeKit and turned Home Hub off then back on. I then created a new automation for one of my Wemo with Thread plugs and it worked fine. I then edited the automation to control lights that run through an Insteon Plus Hub and that worked. An automation for my thermostat, an iComfort by Lennox also worked fine.

So far the solution seems to be similar to the standard computer fix, Reboot.

Follow up to my posting. My nanoleaf bulbs were always "updating" and/or "not found". I have two automations that were set to sunrise and sunset to activate a scene. They were not responding. Lights that were activated by a specific time were still working. I deleted the scene automations and remade them. (Pretty much outside lights to go on at sunset and off at sunrise.). I then power-cycled the Homepod Mini. All has been work fine for about 4 days. No issues with the nanoleaf bulbs either. Take it for what it's worth and maybe this is helpful to others.

After following this thread since the beginning and trying many things myself, here is what worked for me although I’m not sure which of the two ultimately did the trick:

1. Delete and reinstall the Home app on your iPhone (and iPad?). You won’t lose anything. You will have to remove any HomePods and re-add them after reinstalling the Home app.
2. *Log out of iCloud on all AppleTVs, reboot them all, then log back in starting with the one you want to be the main (connected) hub.

*This is what I suspect did the job.

I haven’t seen where anyone that has removed/re-added devices, scenes, or automations have had total success. After the above two steps, I have not had a single issue and I did them over a week ago.

Good luck!

OK, so I also got my automatons to function again. Granted I don't have as complicated as a setup like some of you, but I did follow some of your suggestions and was able to finally resolve my location-based automation issues (time-based and motion-sensor based automations were always working for me).

After completing all the previous steps (restarts of all devices, and only signing out of icloud on my Apple TV and back in again after a restart), my location-based automations still refused to function.

Following suggestions from many of you, I deleted my Home app, reinstalled it, and also deleted and recreated my automations. Now my automations work. When I left the apt, the "Leaving Home" automation turned off all my lights. When I returned home, my "Coming Home" automation engaged my lights scene successfully.

So in all, here's what I did that resolved this:

1. Signed out of iCloud on my Apple TV
2. Restarted Apple TV
3. Removed my HomePod and HomePod minis from the Home app
4. Fully deleted the Home app
5. Reinstalled the Home app
6. Signed back into iCloud on my Apple TV
7. Re-enabled my Apple TV as a home hub
8. Setup each of my HomePods once again
9. Confirmed all HomePods appeared as home hubs in the Home app
10. Deleted my automations
11. Recreated each automation as they were before

I don't know if each of those steps is necessary, or maybe one set or two, but now everything is back to normal. To be clear, my Apple TV is my connected home hub once again, just as it was before the issue and during the issue. I suspect HomeKit data (possibly in both iCloud and in the home app and/or on the home hubs) was corrupted upon upgrading to iOS 16. Signing out of iCloud and then back in on my Apple TV, restoring the HomePods, deleting the app, reconnecting my Apple devices, and recreating the automations seems to have worked.

I've been submitting bugs and sending logs for a couple of weeks now, every time an automation failed to engage. Hopefully Apple is getting enough data to resolve this. I also sent them the above info in another followup so they are aware of what possibly resolved this for me.