I got Homepods for all my rooms. Woops. The unpredictable bad behavior is maddening. All intermittent but frequent problems:
• I ask Homepods to play some music, and music starts playing in another room.
• I ask a room to play something, it says that is not in my library. I ask again. Same response. The problem comes in two flavors: One, I have to power cycle the Homepod to get things to reconnect. Or two, there is a halflife of disconnect where each time I ask there is an independent 1/2 chance of resolving the problem.
• I ask the Homepod to play something in multiple rooms. Some rooms play others don't. Sometimes, one room will start and stop playing randomly. Sometimes all the rooms will start and stop playing randomly.
• I ask a Homepod to play in a Zone. Same issues as asking for multiple rooms explicitly.
• Sometimes paired Homepods will both play, sometimes only one.
• Sometimes Homepods in a pair respond differently. If I carefully ensure only one hears me, it might be the one that starts the music that the other one refuses to do.
I can go on, but my experience is Homepods don't scale. A single pod or pair are much more reliable. Obviously, the more components a system has the greater chance of a problem, but it shouldn't be every day, or multiple times a day, for an integer we normally think of as "small N".
To say my Homepod use has been shaped by these failures is an understatement.
Apple has completely dropped the ball on Homekit. The app interfaces are completely ridiculous. Bad parody of bad app interfaces ridiculous.
That’s really weird, I have HomePods gen 1 & 2 (and a few mini’s) and they’ve worked fine so far. More often than not my room mates are more of a problem than the HomePods. Usually someone will connect their call to a random HomePod, which is usually pretty disconcerting.
I will say though I rarely ask the HomePods themselves to play music and almost always use a phone to start the music. I have ~7 connected around the house. I used a few different voices though so I know which one responded so I know which one to go after if I set a timer, since 3 share an open loft area and for that it can be a bit weird which one gets the request.
I have mostly HomePod Mini pairs, and a couple individual Homepods. I do have quite a few rooms, but my network is solid. Perhaps having a series of wired WiFi repeaters gives Homekit trouble, but nothing else has issues.
> almost always use a phone to start the music
This works better for me too. I still have (much less frequent) trouble casting to some random room's speakers.
But that is cumbersome compared to just asking, especially for multiple rooms. Since "Zones" don't show up in the iOS and macOS volume/speaker-group interfaces at all, as far as I can tell.
And then there is Apple's design choice to only let each room appear in one "Zone". No idea why each zone can't simply be its own set. Leave it up to users to care if two people are fighting over what plays in some joint room - it would be a problem that reflected editable zone definitions, not a bug.
The whole system is inexplicably janky: by design, lack of original effort, subsequent inattention, and bug.
It's janky because it's poorly thought out and they tried to give too much with too little capacity.
It's stupid that you have to stream for a phone in the first place when you could have something connected to power act as a local server and not deplete the battery from your phone (and enjoy the unreliability of wifi on top).
Apple has just made a poor decision for the "wow" factor that never makes for a great working product in the end.
The hardest part is saying no to stuff that don't make sense and the way they have implemented Homepods/Homekit is just a testament of that.
> It's stupid that you have to stream for a phone in the first place when you could have something connected to power act as a local server and not deplete the battery from your phone (and enjoy the unreliability of wifi on top).
You aren’t streaming from your phone? I was under the impression that HomePods only stream phone calls. Media is accessed by the HomePod itself, and your phone either gets updates from it on what is playing or your phone is telling it what to play. Evidenced by if you disconnect wifi on your phone the HomePod will continue the current song without your device.
And it’s not just through siri - everything home seems to have a life of its own. It works most of the time, but that, especially at home is not enough.
This is disappointing to hear. I was thinking of getting some HomePods to replace my Sonos system which has got progressively less reliable over the years to the point of being virtually useless now.
Are there any modern home audio setups that connect to streaming services and actually work reliably? At this point I’m thinking of just going back to an iPod and dock like it’s 2006.
It’s not a simple plug in and stream product, but ever since replacing Sonos with Control4 we’ve been incredibly happy. Josh on top of it for voice and it “just works”.
As I said, not a direct comparison, but starting to think consumer level stuff like Sonos and HonePods just doesn’t have the right incentive structure anymore to deliver the level of quality we all seem to be asking for.
I have Sonos and they work perfectly, I love them. If you think Sonos is bad (recent app update included) go look at the HomePod subreddit, it is basically non stop issues. Having said that, I use Airplay a bunch and it is fine for me. I have had problems with Airplay in the past that were 100% solved by checking and improving wifi signal strength.
I'm testing out Wiim in a couple rooms as a replacement for Sonos and the initial results have been positive, though I haven't been using them long. So far my biggest complaints are that every model in their lineup has a different protocol compatibility list and that the Spotify integration isn't as well-polished.
If your Sonos speakers are old enough, take a day out and downgrade them all to S1. Just like magic it will all start working like it did the day you got it.
• I ask Homepods to play some music, and music starts playing in another room.
• I ask a room to play something, it says that is not in my library. I ask again. Same response. The problem comes in two flavors: One, I have to power cycle the Homepod to get things to reconnect. Or two, there is a halflife of disconnect where each time I ask there is an independent 1/2 chance of resolving the problem.
• I ask the Homepod to play something in multiple rooms. Some rooms play others don't. Sometimes, one room will start and stop playing randomly. Sometimes all the rooms will start and stop playing randomly.
• I ask a Homepod to play in a Zone. Same issues as asking for multiple rooms explicitly.
• Sometimes paired Homepods will both play, sometimes only one.
• Sometimes Homepods in a pair respond differently. If I carefully ensure only one hears me, it might be the one that starts the music that the other one refuses to do.
I can go on, but my experience is Homepods don't scale. A single pod or pair are much more reliable. Obviously, the more components a system has the greater chance of a problem, but it shouldn't be every day, or multiple times a day, for an integer we normally think of as "small N".
To say my Homepod use has been shaped by these failures is an understatement.
Apple has completely dropped the ball on Homekit. The app interfaces are completely ridiculous. Bad parody of bad app interfaces ridiculous.