Homekit Requires Hub Reboot

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1

This has probably been covered, but wading thru the thousands of posts was proving too much.

Anyway, my friends system which I maintain is using the HOmekit integration. Been working fine. He calls last night and everything is "No Response". I restarted the integration. Had him close the app on phone and restart. Had him power down the Ipod Mini. Nothing worked. the only thing that solved it was a reboot of the HUB itself. C5 hub. Very few items are used, 6 Zigbee plugs, 4 virtual switches.

Aside from the Homekit, everything was working fine.

Why would that be necessary?

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2

Here's a strange but similar problem. I was having problem with my zigbee lights (I have a lot of different protocols) which usually sorts itself out in if I restart my hub. I installed an update and had to reboot all my homekit hubs (2 Apple TV units and an iPad). It's been rock solid ever since, but I'm still thinking about the C8 hubitat..... money(sad).

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This is starting to be a regular occurence. Homekit stops working. Restarting the integration doesn't help. The only way to get it back up and running is to do a hub reboot.

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Have you tried rebooting your home network equipment (I.e. your router and wireless access points) when this issue occurs? What about rebooting your Apple HomeKit “hub” devices? I know rebooting the Hubitat hub works, but I am curious if there might be a different underlying issue at work here. My Hubitat C8 Pro, using the built-in HomeKit integration, has been performing great for many months.

I have seen numerous reports in HomeKit specific forums where this type of issue is resolved by rebooting routers and HomeKit hubs. Just curious if rebooting the Hubitat hub is masking the real issue?

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My guess is that there is some 'quirk' in Hubitat's MDNS networking implementation that has some interaction with some routers that causes all these issues. I've never had any issues with Hubitat and HomeKit on my Unifi network.

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Same here. UniFi network, with AppleTV 4K as my Apple Home Hub. Been very stable and reliable.

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Wondering if this is related to the rash of people who suddenly are having the hub think it is offline and cannot reach the cloud? Could that be making the HomeKit stop working as well, even though it does not rely on the cloud connection?

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Sorry for the late response, busy weekend.

I have not tried on my friend's system to reboot his router/modem. He has ATT internet/TV and they supplied the unit. I think it might have been replaced some months back by ATT but not sure. He is about 3 hours from me so I haven't seen it in a while.

He did reboot the Homepod which didn't seem to help.

I had the same issue on my system some time back where I had to reboot the hub to get Homekit back up and running. After the fact I noticed that my router had done a reboot a few hours earlier. I have it set to automatically reboot once a week. But I had to reboot the hub to get things back working.

Not sure how HE ties into the Apple system and networking stuff, but kinda wondering if there is some issue with it all. On my friends system I don't believe he has backup power on the router. He does on the HE hub tho. So wondering if a power blib could cause that kind of issue.

Next time it happens I'll have him reboot the router and see what happens.

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Scenario that happened today.
This morning at 3 am my router did it's weekly reboot.
4 am, I had to get up to let out the 4 legged fur ball. (He's getting old and can't hold it).
Told Siri to turn off alarm. She told me she couldn't reach HE. (Or something like that)
Used keypad to turn off alarm.
Siri responded on POD via Airplay Integration that alarm was off. So Airplay was working.
5:30 am I got up for good. Checked phone and Homekit had no response.
Closed phone app, waited a little bit, re-opened app. Still no response.
I have a second hub with a second Homekit instance. So switched to that on my phone and it was working.
Switched back to my main hub instance in phone app and then it came back up.

Does any of this help anyone to give me some idea what might be going on?

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Do you have only the one WiFi Access Point built into your router?
What device(s) are you using as your "Apple Home Hub"?

I am wondering is rebooting your router is the root cause of what started the issue? If you're using an Apple HomePod (WiFi only) or an AppleTV connected via WiFi, I wonder if yanking the WiFi AP out from underneath that device is what starts the issue? Just a hypothesis.

Or, if your Hubitat Hub is directly connected to your router's LAN port... Perhaps rebooting the router is what caused start of the issue?

In my home network setup, I am using UniFi hardware. Thus, if I reboot my UDM-SE (router), it does not cause this type of issue. However, my WiFi APs stay up and running, as well as my network switches. Thus, all devices on ,y LAN can still communicate with each other even if I reboot my router... Perhaps this is a difference that might explain why I don't see this type of issue? Again, just a hypothesis. I have no data to back this up.

Perhaps you could either remove the weekly reboot of your router? Or maybe run a test where you reboot it every day, to see if the Apple HomeKit connectivity issue correlates to router reboots?

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I only have the one WIFI Access with both 2g and 5g.

I have several Homepod Mini's and 1 Apple TV

Yes

Gonna try this. The problem doesn't happen every week, or every time the router reboots.

On my friends system I don't know if his router/modem is rebooting for any reason. Maybe a power blib or it is automatically updating, etc. Not being there and he not being tech minded makes it a little hard to figure out.

Anyway, Just throwing out something I observed this morning in trying to narrow down what might be causing it.

EDIT: I wish there was someway to detect if the Homekit integration was down. So if his went down I could get a notification and try to take care of it before he might even notice.

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I'm having the same experience where devices appear offline in Homekit even though the Hubitat is online. Only way to solve this is restarting Hubitat. All my Apple and Hubitat devices are completely up to date, my routers are current, etc. etc. There is something in the App code it appears that is losing the connection to Apple Home.
I'm relying on Hubitat to handle home security devices now, until couple months ago this was rock solid. Any solutions?

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Having the same issue. HomeKit is offline and requires a hub reboot.

We need to raise this as a concern to the team.

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I'm also having this issue where I need to reboot my hub every 3-5 days to get Homekit integration working. Restart hourly option is enabled but that doesn't help.

I also have Tonesto7 Homebridge v2 running for some door locks and have no issues with that. Would rather not move everything over to that but this is becoming a problem.

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I have recently started having this same issue.
My hubitat has never been registered, so it's not that.
I can control things from the hubitat web ui when the problem occurs.
All HomeKit items are listed as no response.
My hubitat is a C-8 and on current firmware as of his post.
I have rebooted all the apple devices, so it's not that.
I have rebooted all the network gear, so it's not that
The problem is 100% in the hubitat.
All the apple devices, smart devices and hubitat are on the same subnet. no firewalls involved. so it's not that.
I have no HomeKit automations. All automation is controlled by hubitat.
The only thing HomeKit does is give me a mobile UI into the devices shared via hubitat. I wonder if this is intentional to force the purchase of the hubitat mobile app subscription.

it would be nice if someone from hubitat would actually chime in here since it does appear to be a firmware issue that was introduced a few revisions back.

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The Hubitat Mobile app is free, as is the use of the Hubitat Cloud server to allow remote access to Hubitat dashboards while away from home.

Hubitat’s Remote ADMIN subscription allows full access to the hub’s admin web interface while away from home.

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ok.. that was my misunderstanding of the app then. when i was new to hubitat i asked about it and i was told it was subscription. either way it doesn't fix the current issue I'm having with the no response.

I'll check out the app to see if that can replace my need for the apple home app. Correct me if I'm wrong, i will still need apple HomePods as boarder routers.

One other symptom is that i cant issue voice commands to siri. Once the hubitat reboots that works again. I suspect just switching the mobile app will not solve that problem.

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Understood - but let's not speculate about Hubitat's intentions. :wink:

@gopher.ny has been working on trying to improve the HomeKit 'no response' issue in multiple recent Beta releases. I am personally not having that issue, and thus I cannot speak to whether any of these tweaks have made things better or worse.

When you mention "boarder routers", are you referring to Matter Thread Border Routers (TBR)? A TBR is only needed if you have Matter over Thread devices that you want to integrate with Apple Home, Hubitat, Google Home, or Amazon Alexa. Do you have any Matter over Thread devices? If so, those would be paired directly to your Apple Home as Matter devices, which would then be shared to Hubitat as Matter devices. This has absolutely nothing to do with Hubitat's HomeKit integration, which allows Hubitat Zigbee, Z-Wave, LAN, and Virtual devices to be shared with Apple Home via HomeKit.

Apple Home can talk to devices in multiple ways:

  • Apple HomeKit protocol over WiFi/Ethernet
  • Apple HomeKit protocol over Thread
  • Matter protocol over WiFi/Ethernet
  • Matter protocol over Thread

Hubitat's HomeKit integration allows Hubitat direct-connected devices to be shared with Apple Home using the first method in the above list ("Apple HomeKit protocol over WiFi/Ethernet"). In this scenario, there is no Thread Border Router involved whatsoever.

Have you considered running a small Homebridge server on your home network? A small Raspberry Pi can run Homebridge very well. There are two community solutions that were created before Hubitat added their native HomeKit integration, which provide very reliable methods of bringing Hubitat devices into Apple Home.

I personally use the built-in Hubitat HomeKit integration for a few recently added virtual presence sensors that I added to replace Life360 for geopresence. These have been working flawlessly for many, many months now.

I also have Homebridge running on a RPi, using @dan.t's very elegant and simple Hubitat to HomeKit via MakerAPI integration. This has been rock solid for my for many years. As such, I have found no reason to try to move everything to Hubitat's built-in HomeKit integration.

Perhaps the fact that I only have a small number of devices using Hubitat's built-in HK integration is why it has been reliable for me, and not for others? Just a hypothesis.

There are currently at least 3 options for getting Hubitat devices into Apple Home.

It is great to have multiple options to try out! :sunglasses:

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i have about 10 devices that use Matter protocol over WiFi/Ethernet. these all need to be shared so they can be added to hubitat. i have about 2 or 3 Matter protocol over Thread.

I'm using the Hubitat built-in HomeKit integration to get things into apple home.

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I wish I could say the same. Mine are just spoiled rotten and way to use to going out whenever they want. Even the 2-year-old GSD. She suddenly remembers in the middle of the night a toy was left in the yard.

Back to the topic at hand. I had everything not responding (curiously except three Matter bulbs included via home kit) last week. In that case I rebooted the AppleTV that I have the HomeKit integration tied to and that cleared everything up.