There was a piece this weekend about relying on Apple Home while travelling, and it flagged the thing people forget until they are already at the airport: none of the remote access works without a resident hub sitting at home. An Apple TV or a HomePod has to be there, awake and online, or the app just spins and you get nothing.
I got caught by this in a dumber way than most. My hub was an Apple TV plugged into a smart strip that also fed the amp, and I had put the strip on a schedule to cut power overnight to save standby draw. Killed the hub every night at 1am. Everything remote worked fine until the one week I was away and needed it, and I spent two days assuming the cameras had failed.
A HomePod is the better hub for exactly that reason. Nobody unplugs a speaker, nobody puts it on a timer, and it does not sit behind the AV gear that gets rearranged. If the Apple TV is your only option, wire it to ethernet and leave the power alone. Also worth checking before you build anything on it: not every Apple TV model has a Thread radio, so if you have leaned into Thread accessories, confirm what your specific box actually has rather than assuming.
The part I have never got a clean answer on is failover. With two hubs in the house the system picks one, and there is no obvious way to see which is currently doing the work, or to prove the second one takes over cleanly when the first drops.
Has anyone actually tested that? Pull the primary hub off the network and see how long the house takes to notice.
I got caught by this in a dumber way than most. My hub was an Apple TV plugged into a smart strip that also fed the amp, and I had put the strip on a schedule to cut power overnight to save standby draw. Killed the hub every night at 1am. Everything remote worked fine until the one week I was away and needed it, and I spent two days assuming the cameras had failed.
A HomePod is the better hub for exactly that reason. Nobody unplugs a speaker, nobody puts it on a timer, and it does not sit behind the AV gear that gets rearranged. If the Apple TV is your only option, wire it to ethernet and leave the power alone. Also worth checking before you build anything on it: not every Apple TV model has a Thread radio, so if you have leaned into Thread accessories, confirm what your specific box actually has rather than assuming.
The part I have never got a clean answer on is failover. With two hubs in the house the system picks one, and there is no obvious way to see which is currently doing the work, or to prove the second one takes over cleanly when the first drops.
Has anyone actually tested that? Pull the primary hub off the network and see how long the house takes to notice.
