Homekit Automations are broken in iOS 16

My workaround to my timed automations failing to run has been to restart my Apple TV home hub every day. I do this via Restart in the Settings System menu.

Before I arrived at this, my automations would seem to work for about a day but then one or another would fail to run.

It’s especially annoying and borderline a safety concern when my outside lights fail to turn on at sunset. I wish Apple would take this appropriately seriously.

Since I’ve been doing this daily restart, so far for a few days now, things have been working. Obviously it’s a crummy workaround.

(I wish I could figure out an automation that would shut off the power to my Apple TV once a day with some automatic way for the power to come back on after a short interval.)

Speculating, it’s almost like the software thread on the Apple TV hub in charge of timed automations crashes, or at least hiccups, after about a day.

I have no HomePods and never have. I have the latest Apple TV with the thread border router functionality.

Maybe try something I reported earlier... I realised that my automations scheduled for the early hours sometimes failed. I noticed that my Original Homepod was acting as the Home Hub (an Apple TV 4K was on standby).

I decided to try forcing the Homepod to stay awake by playing music in a loop (at very low volume). This seems to fix my problem.

So... I am wondering if you could try the same with the Apple TV - play music continuously.

Maybe also check for wifi issues such as appliance interference.

Robin Phillips1 wrote:

My best suggestion is to make sure whatever devices are acting as your home hub are running 16.2, for example HomePod or appletv.

For many of us (but perhaps not all) that has fixed it.

This would very likely be the solution for many more people than have tried it. I still see many struggling with complex work-arounds when simply checking to make sure your home hub(s) are running the latest OS update (and forcing them to update if they aren't yet) is probably all they actually need to do.

An apple advisor had me reset my Network Settings on my phone....after which, I recreated a new (timed) automation. That worked! Now I just have to redo ALL my other automations and test. At least I won't have to recreate my home and re-add all my devices...for now!

My complete installation from

scratch on a new home works perfectly now. It took me lot of time and screenshots of all devices and automation rules. I also updated all my Shelly’s to the last software release available just to be sure it’s compatible. No glitches and no strange things happening anymore on the fresh installation.

A possible solution in my case...

I kept my Homepods awake all night by putting an album on repeat. Last night all automations worked when they failed on previous nights (back to the OS16 update). So it is possible, in my case, that Homepod hubs going to sleep is causing Homekit problems.

The Homepods are default audio output for my Apple TV 4K, which is disabled as a Home Hub as part of my troubleshooting.

Accessories include Cygnett power outlets, Ikea (bridged) power outlet and LiFX lights. No Thread yet. I replaced Wemo power outlets months ago when they became unreliable - I had to restart the bridge every couple of days.

Things so far have been mostly good since I reinstalled everything. I only left the one HomePod mini configured throughout the process, and once everything else was added to my liking, only then did I add the second HomePod back, and the family members accounts. So far I have not added the AppleTVs to Home just to keep things simpler. I was planning on reporting back in a few days if things still worked properly…

However today there is a new HomePod OS update, which has me on edge because throughout HomePod OS 15, these updates frequently resulted in the dreaded "Loading Accessories and Scenes" message—and every time this happened my only option was to rebuild everything from scratch, which I just finished doing last weekend due to iOS 16.0. I'm installing the 16.1 updates and hoping I don't have to go through that again already.

majapp, your problems with Thread devices is a real mystery. I was able to add four Eve Thread-compatible smart plugs without a problem, but then I had also completely nuked my entire Home setup (removed all family, deleted the HP minis, deleted the Home setup, deleted the Home app, factory reset the HPs) and rebuilt everything from scratch. So far so good, but I haven't added my two AppleTV 4Ks to the HomeKit soup yet. Maybe this weekend I'll take that step.

I didn't see if you went this far with your setup—and I wouldn't fault you if you didn't want to—but this seems to be what cured most of my issues. There is also the possibility one or more devices on your network aren't behaving properly, and interfering with the Thread network you're trying to set up. Although that's a reach since one of the big concepts behind Thread is it's able to work around problem devices.

If I were in your situation, I would do what I did: fully reset everything, delete the app, create a brand new Home, factory reset and add a single HP speaker, and then try adding a Full Thread device.

• If you still can't add any Thread devices at all, you probably have something very wrong with the HP mini failing to act as the Thread main router (I believe this is the "Leader"). At this point you can restart with a different HP mini speaker or an ATV 4K as the initial hub.
• If you're able to add a single Thread device, continue adding one vendor's devices at a time. First all the Eve devices, then all the Wemos, then the Nanoleaf, etc. At first only add the Full Thread devices—these are the mains powered devices like plugs and wired switches that act as Thread network nodes. Save adding any battery powered Thread devices (sensors) for last as those are only endpoints. I would monitor the Eve app's Settings > Thread Network pane as you're building your Thread network out, as it can report on the role (border router, endpoint, etc.) each device sets itself up with. Since no one is using Matter right now, it might take some time for each one to show up in Eve. Wait until you see one before adding the next.
• If adding a particular device kills the Thread network, maybe it needs to be replaced. It could be that two devices are trying to be the "leader" and conflicting with each other, or…something else. It isn't supposed to happen in Thread, but it probably can, because "technology."
• With any luck you'd be able to add all your Thread devices successfully, then you can add all your non-Thread devices, and start rebuilding the rest of your Home configuration.
• Once the Home configuration is to your liking, add those other ATVs and HP minis one at a time, waiting long enough in between to be sure each updates with the current Home data.

I understand this is a terrible, awful, miserably time consuming amount of effort (I set aside a weekend) but at this point I wouldn't count on a "magic bullet" iOS update from Apple that will solve any of our existing HomeKit issues. Even though many of us are tech-savvy home automation users, we haven't been given many tools outside of the trial-and-error method to investigate and troubleshoot problems.

Good luck, and I'll burn a pile of CAT-3 cables in offering to the technology deities for you 🤖

Michael, are you turning the switch on directly in the automation, or triggering a scene? Because one thing that has never worked in Home is using an automation/shortcut to turn off a scene, and that HomeKit quirk carries over into the "Turn off after ___".

Or maybe you have a scene which is also sending an "on" command to the switch, but after your 7 AM automation trigger, and that scene now has taken priority over the 7 AM automation.

I have three Hue motion sensors I've set up to trigger lights directly (not through a scene) and the automation respects the turn off after setting (well most of the time, because HomeKit is still being janky).

The most consistent fix I have found is this .....

1. determine the current active home hub
2. restart this hub - if problems with ID, restart again (don't just unplug, restart)
3. the active hub will jump to a new device
4. restart this new active hub, just to be sure

that's it, the system will now work (at least for my system), until something new is added - then go to 1 again if it starts acting quirky

Yes, seeing this too. Very disappointing.

Creating automations in the Eve app appears to work 100% though. Scenes needed there.

This is only for the time of day automations that need this workaround as far as I can tell at this time.

So that could be a decent workaround for some perhaps while waiting for the fix.

I’ve had a number of major problems with HomeKit over the years. A couple of them have been escalated by Apple support to engineering.

min that time I’ve ended up removing and re-adding the home to my iCloud profile a few times. It’s a total pain and I really resent this being a support recommendation without a viable backup solution provided. Fine, if it fixes the problem that’s great. But it never has so then it’s just a massive waste of time getting everything set up again.

It’s always been set up initially via my Apple ID.

Anyway, that’s some back story.

We have been suffering from this problem for a few weeks. It’s really annoying.

Mostly automations fail to run. Sometimes they do run if they have been just created and are due to run just a few minutes in the future. Sometimes they run at the wrong times.

This is the most puzzling of them all and the most annoying because of waking up our daughter in the middle of the night. Simply unacceptable.

It’s early days but I think I might have found the cause of the problem and therefore the solution.

My wife’s home app had multiple ‘homes’. Presumably a hangover from the previous support requests to remove and re-add the home. Thereby each time creating essentially a new home for other members of the household.

Deleting the other disused ‘homes’ seems to have prompted things to start working better. It’s early days but fingers crossed.

Apple’s unhelpful and time-wasting support policy — I think — might have been the cause of this problem for me.

This comes after yesterday I had a long disagreement with a senior Apple support rep who was insisting I must delete the home and redo it or they wouldn’t continue to assist. The irony.

Disabling and then reenabling the home hub also fixes it. This seems like a much easier solution than deleting and recreating automations, especially if the bug hits more than one of them. Making a change to the automation still requires you to repeat the procedure, but it's still the easier temporary fix to use until Apple figures out the real solution. Nothing seems to be gained by dealing with it in the many harder ways suggested in this thread.

I’ve never had to blast away indiscriminately at a problem and didn’t this time either. I simply disabled then reenabled the home hub and the automation worked again. This solution should work for a lot of people until Apple fixes the underlying issue. Just don’t change the automation after it’s working or you will have to do it again.

Hey folks it definitely works to set up automation tied to SCENES instead. No resets required. Also scenes is actually better because you can set a bunch of lights to do a thing with a single automation. It’s only annoying if your automation is a single light. I will probably

use just scenes moving forward because it’s easier to edit, too!

Good luck !!