On our latest IoT Podcast episode, we take a question that Chris left on our IoT Voicemail hotline. Chris has a pair of Apple TV 4K boxes and one HomePod mini, all of which can be used as an Apple HomeKit hub. You can use HomeKit without a hub, but if you want to run automations or remotely access your smart home, you’ll need a hub. Lately, his devices have been stuck in Standby mode and Chris is wondering how to fix this problem.
The bulk of my smart home is built around Apple HomeKit and I use a HomePod mini for my own hub. But I’ve never experienced the Standby issue that Chris is talking about. However, this problem has been reported by many HomeKit users for the past several years. So while I can’t replicate the problem for troubleshooting, I can offer Chris some recommended advice.
Apple actually has a dedicated support page with a specific “If your home hub isn’t working as expected” section. It’s the page that Apple Support points people to who have a HomeKit hub in Standby mode. Some of the troubleshooting steps there are basic but they all make sense to me:
- Check that your HomePod, HomePod mini, Apple TV 4K or Apple TV HD, or iPad is up to date.
- Make sure that the user signed in to iCloud is the primary Home app user, and not an invited user.
- Turn on iCloud Keychain and two-factor authentication for your Apple ID.
- Check that the device that you set up as a home hub is in your home, connected to your home Wi-Fi network, and powered on.
Keeping your iOS devices up to date is certainly a must, but I doubt most HomeKit hubs in Standby mode are behind by several versions. Still, it’s worth ensuring that they’re running the latest version of iOS.
I could see the second and third steps as being part of the problem for some people. So Chris should double-check the user settings in his Apple Home app. And he should verify the security settings as well. As far as the fourth step, well… that should probably be step one. It’s unlikely to be the root cause of the Standby issue, in my opinion, especially if the hub was working prior.
One other success story in fixing this problem comes from a MacRumors forum:
Go into the bridge settings in the Home app and see what it says for the Apple TV. In my case, it said “Standby”. That was the issue. It should say “Connected”. Then go into the Apple TV settings (not on the iPhone but on the Apple TV itself) and go to the HomeKit settings. There (at the bottom) disable the Apple TV as the “home hub” and then re-enable it.
If Apple’s own support steps don’t fix the problem, I’d try changing the Apple TV settings as noted above. Sometimes re-enabling a feature after you’ve turned it off actually does resolve a technical issue.
To hear Chris’s question, as well as our discussion in full, tune in to the IoT Podcast below:
I’ve run into the standby problem occasionally, and have narrowed it down to the following set of issues.
1) I have multiple devices in my homekit setup that have been identified as being usable as a hub. That’s not a problem, and when everything is working right, one of these will be active and the others will be in standby mode. The problem comes when they are all in standby mode.
2) my original hub was an iPad, but it can only function as a hub when it’s plugged in, not when it’s on battery.
3) after I added two HomePod minis, one of those became the primary hub, which was good. And another iPad that I had got out of date and so I started using the one which is also identified as being a possible hub, for every day use on my wheelchair, so it’s no longer plugged in all the time. It’s mostly running on battery.
All of that works fine almost all the time. However…
If there is an operating system update that causes my HomePod to update, it drops its status as the primary HomeKit hub, which makes sense.
However, when everything comes back, it appears that my system quite often tries to select the iPad as the HomeKit hub, but because now it’s not powered on, it’s in standby and everything else is also in standby because they weren’t the primary. So now I have the problem you described.
For me, the reason that the instructions on the Apple page work is because once I’ve signed everything out of iCloud and back in again and then are no longer any updates pending, the HomePod mini goes back to being the primary and everything is working again.
So…for me, this issue occurs because I have both an iPad and a homepod mini identified as possible hubs in my HomeKit set up. Normally that’s fine. But if it happens that the HomePod gets an update while the iPad is on battery, not plugged in, I think the system tries to switch to the iPad but says that it is in standby because it’s on battery and then when the HomePod finishes updating it’s still on standby because it thinks the iPad is supposed to be the primary now. That’s why making sure everything is up-to-date so there are no updates pending and logging out and logging back in gets it all in sync again.
If you only have one device identified as being a hub for HomeKit, I don’t think he will ever see this problem.
And I’m guessing that if an iPad which is identified as a hub always remains plugged in, you probably won’t see this problem either.
At least for me, the issue is when The system is switching away from a HomePod mini which is doing an update but the device it wants to switch to is not available either. At my house most commonly because an iPad identified as being available as a HomeKit hub is on battery instead of plugged in when the HomePod gets an update.
I don’t 100% sure I know that this is the problem, but it does seem to describe the issues that I see.
I’ll be honest: I haven’t experimented to see whether it would make more sense to just stop using the iPad as an available HomeKit hub since it isn’t always plugged in.
FWIW…