[asiachick]

I'm sure I'm "doing it wrong" but the lights on my homekit, bought directly from Apple, take 5 to 90 seconds to respond and worse, the Home App (by Apple) often gives zero indication it even noticed I pressed a button in the app.

in other words I'll press the off button for a room but there is no indication that it understood me and it's going to turn off the lights, then if I wait 5 to 90 seconds it may eventually turn them off, or not, try again. If I try again at the wrong time, as in just before it was about to actually turn them off then of course it turns them back on, repeat

my guess is apple only tests in some kind of ideal conditions and has no idea their system is so crap in others.

[InvaderFizz]

I've run into a few issues that are relatively easily solved.

My number one recommendation is to make sure your AppleTV home hub is wired.

Why? It is what relays signals when you are not on the local network and having it wired virtually guarantees the WiFi endpoints get the control command and you don't fall prey to things like client isolation blocking your command.

Especially if your WiFi equipment is Ubiquiti, this is a major pain point.

The same advice applies to WiFi capable network printers, for the same reasons as above.

[lotsofpulp]

Wired connections to Apple TVs and numerous wired access points make a world of difference. And good quality routers/access points.

I would not even bother with Homekit (or any other system) without a higher end wired home networking setup.

[asiachick]

I'm not sure Wifi has anything to do with it but then I have no idea how this stuff works. I have one Meross Smart Plug Mini. It's the only thing that shows up on my router. I have 11 Nanoleaf essentials A19 Bulb (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HPE62ZM/A/nanoleaf-essent...). None of those show up on Wifi so no idea how they work (Bluetooth, Wifi Broadcast)

6 of them are less than 10 feet from the WiFi AP in the same room, and also less than 10ft from an AppleTV (3 are 5ft from it). The other 5 of them are in the next room (so less than 20ft from the AP). in that room I have no problem streaming 5-10 streams of simultaneous video over Wifi to my laptop

AppleTV is on wired network.

All of the lights are slow to respond. The ones on the same room as the AP and the ones away. It doesn't matter. The Meross plug, which is on Wifi, is almost always instant to respond, but, in the 6 months I've owned it it's entirely failed to respond at all 3 times (so once ever 2 months) at which point I go manually unplug it. Plugging it in immediately doesn't fix the issue but plugging it in a few days later seem to reset it.

The whole thing is super frustrating and feels not ready for prime time. I feel duped.

[oarsinsync]

> My number one recommendation is to make sure your AppleTV home hub is wired.

Tragically, if you have the original ATV4 (September 2017), it's only got a 100Mb Ethernet port, which is embarassing for something released in 2017.

Even more tragically, when I use Plex, I often find it's hitting some weird bug in the ATV4 where it will be unable to stream 10Mbps videos when wired, but has absolutely no problem streaming those same videos when on wifi, despite being less than 20 feet of copper cabling between the apple tv, network switch, and the Plex server.

Of course, having an AC1700 wifi AP means that wifi is massively faster than wired for the ATV4, but shouldn't matter when the video peak bitrate is 10% of the max wired speed, but watching the monitoring of the server, the client is just requesting data at too low a rate.

Never bothered to actually pcap it to identify, but I'm willing to bet that some weird condition was triggering on the ATV4 resulting in too low a TCP window size being used.

Either way, "wired is always better" is generally true, unless you have an Apple TV 4th Generation. Then it's not always true.

..and even wired, my Hue lights are still slow to respond through Home.app, but immediate to respond to the physical zigbee button.

[theshrike79]

I frequent a bunch of home automation related subreddits and FB groups.

In 99% of the cases shitty HomeKit functionality is because of crappy WiFi. People are using whatever cheapo crap their ISP gave them for free.

  1) Get a better WiFi access point, disable the integrated crap your ISP gave you
  2) Use either a HomePod or an AppleTV as the home's central hub, don't connect it via wifi.

This will most likely fix any issues. I've got a wired AppleTV and Unifi for network stuff. I've had zero major issues with HomeKit. A few lights refuse to respond at points, but it's a Zigbee issue, nothing to do with HomeKit.

[poulsbohemian]

>In 99% of the cases shitty HomeKit functionality is because of crappy WiFi. People are using whatever cheapo crap their ISP gave them for free.

FWIW: I consider this to also be an Apple problem. Look, I have no idea how the Airport Express stacked up to the competition really, maybe it was junk, but it generally met my needs and was better than any of the other options I'd used in the past in terms of not having to fiddle with it much. Now imagine you are a consumer with no technical knowledge - do you buy a device or do you go along with whatever your ISP offers you? If Apple made a wifi device of some kind again, of course I'd buy it because I'm already in their ecosystem.

[tomduncalf]

Also experienced issues with HomeKit - Philip’s (terrible IMO) latest update to the Hue app killed the iOS widgets feature and makes you use Shortcuts instead, which uses HomeKit.

I found lights frequently would not respond via Shortcuts/the widget that worked fine via the Hue app. I ended up buying the iConnectHue app which has a native widget and works perfectly.

Not sure what the difference between HomeKit and Hue protocol is in this scenario but it was definitely causing regular issues.

[fathyb]

I'm using HomeKit with Philips Hue lights and I'm not observing any latency, even when using cellular. I think you're experiencing a bug, resetting some stuff might help (the bridge if you have one, or the network settings of a device if it only happens with one). It could also be something related to your wireless access point.

[mvkel]

This is the first I’ve heard of HomeKit having these delays. You sure it’s not connecting via 2.4ghz and hitting interference?