Not completely gone. Much less, but unfortunately 3 days later, the HomePods in the van are not on the van network anymore, but are stuck trying to join the home network. There was never a reason for them to do so, the wifi network in the van is working perfectly well.
I have reset them, and they rejoined the van network. But even when they did, 9 devices on my home network remained unavailable. I have cut the power to them, and minutes later these 9 devices are back up.
Apparantly the van homepods are able to interfere with the home network, even when they cannot access the home wifi network anymore. I think they somehow found a way using bluetooth. Maybe they just use magic. Not the kind of magic I like though.
We offer these bugs to Apple on a silver platter. The solution is to have:
- give people the choice which device should be the homekit hub, as opposed to automatically
- do not synchronise wifi auto-join over all devices with the same AppleID, auto-join makes sense on mobile devices, but not on devices that are never moving in and out of the network. I noticed I said that wrongly in the OP.
- make the wifi auto-join an accessible setting on the HomePods, so nearby wifi networks do not interfere with each other.
I understand things should be userfriendly, and I understand Apple is hiding options so people do not trigger options they should not touch. But IOT networks are a thing these days, and HomeKit has become an awful experience to me and my family, because this is not getting enough attention by Apple development in their ivory tower.
