Climate broken AGAIN in HomePod/homepod mini after tvOS 18.2

Additionally I’ve had an issue with unpairing/ungrouping HomePod minis and resetting them. I decided to move one of a stereo pair from one room to another. First I went into the home app on my phone and ungrouped, then moved one HomePod mini and changed its room designation. This seemed to work fine, however my music app continued to show the old pairing/room designation and to treat them as a stereo pair, piping music through both. I turned off one of them to get full audio out of the other, but even overnight nothing changed.

As usual the only remedy appears to be to remove them. I thought possibly I’d just have to remove one, but no, the music app still listed the stereo pair with one of the speakers online, so both had to be removed from home. I removed the rooms for good measure. Initial setup was as usual, however they’ve said “Configuring” for 45min now and therefore most of the settings are missing. Makes one wonder what Apple thinks “shortly” means! I can send music to them, but weirdly the Airplay list indicates one by its name and one by its room name.

You’d think after several years of these devices Apple could get it right. Wish they just made them speakers and didn’t involve all this HomeKit nonsense!

Additionally I’ve had an issue with unpairing/ungrouping HomePod minis and resetting them. I decided to move one of a stereo pair from one room to another. First I went into the home app on my phone and ungrouped, then moved one HomePod mini and changed its room designation. This seemed to work fine, however my music app continued to show the old pairing/room designation and to treat them as a stereo pair, piping music through both. I turned off one of them to get full audio out of the other, but even overnight nothing changed.

As usual the only remedy appears to be to remove them. I thought possibly I’d just have to remove one, but no, the music app still listed the stereo pair with one of the speakers online, so both had to be removed from home. I removed the rooms for good measure. Initial setup was as usual, however they’ve said “Configuring” for 45min now and therefore most of the settings are missing. Makes one wonder what Apple thinks “shortly” means! After two hours still “configuring” so I did a community forum search and found a thread from Dec ‘23 suggesting that it’s necessary to remove from device list under iCloud account. Did so and reset again, so we’ll see if that does the trick. If not I’ll still be able to play music, but no alarms/timers for me I guess 🤷‍♂️

You’d think after several years of these devices Apple could get it right. Wish they just made them speakers and didn’t involve all this HomeKit nonsense!

So tried restore to both minis from my Mac and same deal. Going to just leave it and try creating a new Home in the app tomorrow as I’ve wasted enough time on this nonsense. Honestly if they weren’t such good airplay speakers I’d get rid of them. The idea that Apple is going to make a big push in the smart home space is laughable if they cannot get this right.

Okay, further test of doing a hard reset on one of the HomePods and putting it into a new home resulted in config completion and a message of temp/humidity calibrating. Deleting the home and putting the HomePod mini back into the previous home put it right back into the “configuration” spiral for a couple of hours until just now when it spontaneously reset itself. So it looks like I may need to just delete my existing home and create a new one for everything or take a chance on these HomePod minis crashing themselves…

Well the HomePod mini in the other room finally finished configuration - only took two hours, so maybe I spoke too soon! The one that “crashed” finished configuration right away as well 🤷‍♂️. Checked and all my HomePods now showing humidity and temp as normal. I unplugged the ones that weren’t reset for ten seconds late anfternoon and power cycled my Eero 6 mesh units, so possibly something shook loose there? I do wish the unpairing had worked better, but at least in the course of that I sorted everything else. I sincerely hope Apple invests a lot more time into making this stuff work better before they do more HomeKit things…