Understood - but let's not speculate about Hubitat's intentions. ![:wink: :wink:](https://community.hubitat.com/images/emoji/apple/wink.png?v=12)
@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: :sunglasses:](https://community.hubitat.com/images/emoji/apple/sunglasses.png?v=12)