dewme

The updates went smoothly and I was able to pair my two minis. After last week’s fiasco with 16.3  I was concerned when the pair went into “Configuring …” for a few minutes. But lo & behold the pair transitioned into “Not Playing …” and I was able to call up an album using Siri. 

hexclock said:

Reading these posts makes HomeKit seem like a mess, at best. I think I’ll wait a little longer before I dive in. 

Anecdotally, it seems like anything that Apple moves to cloud based syncing takes them a while to figure out. The fact that I can view my Home from several different devices and they appear to be different and never show any indications of being in a dirty state makes me very nervous. These are the exact same types of behaviors that I experienced when Apple moved things like your photos and music storage to the cloud, and to a lesser degree with iCloud storage. 

Am I nervous? Hell yeah.

It took me 2 ½ days to recover from 16.3 update. Here's what I found/discovered/stumbled across along the way:

1. If your HomePods (minis in my case) are part of a stereo group and are going to be updated, ungroup them before starting the HomePod update process.

2. Update one HomePod at a time and make sure it completes the entire process cleanly before touching other HomePods. Turn OFF automatic HomePod updates in advance in your Home app settings in-advance if you have stereo groups.

3. If your HomePod gets totally borked and never goes beyond the "Updating ..." phase (for hours):
- Plug the HomePod into your Mac using the power cable (USB-C for mini).
- After a short while the HomePod will start blinking and show up in Finder.
- Click on the device and Finder and do a Restore.
- This will download and install the latest HomePod firmware/software on the HomePod (16.3 this week). It is does not reset everything to factory defaults.
- When the process is complete you'll be prompted to disconnect it from your Mac.
- You can also reset the HomePod directly from the device, but I never had success when I tried this. If the update/download failed it may still be at the previous version, i.e., 16.2 or a beta version. 

4. If you do a Restore on a HomePod, before you plug it back in, remove it from your Home app - AND remove it from the device list associated with your Apple ID. You may have to wait for the device to no longer show up in the device list. Don't worry, it will come back once the device is added back into Home (as indicated during the removal process). Don't try to reinstall the device into your Home before all references to the device are no longer shown in your iCloud devices list. In my case I had a number of aborted attempts that left copies of the devices that never finished the process in my iCloud devices list, which caused the Add Accessory process to fail miserably. 

5. You will have to add the HomePod (accessory) back to your Home as if it is totally new out of the box. But before you do ...

6. Make you use the same device (iPhone or iPad) to perform all of your Accessory functions, like adding a new (or restored) accessory to your Home. This device must be at the latest iOS/iPadOS version.

7. This may be a 16.3 specific issue, but make sure you don't enable any personalized options, e.g., Siri voice recognition, providing access to your calendar, etc., during the HomePod installation process. When the Add accessory process worked as it should I was prompted post-installation to enable these features. You can also toggle these ON in the device-level settings post-installation, after the HomePod no longer reports "Updating" but shows "Not playing." 

8. This may also be specific to my Home, but as a last resort I deleted my Home and created a new one with a new name. I then added one HomePod at a time back to my new home with no other bridge devices (like Apple TV) plugged in. The HomePod mini itself is a bridge and adding it to your home with no other bridges present forces the HomePod to use its bridge functionality during the installation process. Everything went smoothly when I added each HomePod to my home. When the first HomePod mini got to the "Not Playing" state I unplugged it before adding my second HomePod mini to my home. Once the second HomePod mini was at the "Not Playing" state I plugged the first one back in and it too returned to the "Not Playing" state. I then added back in my other bridge devices (Apple TVs) and everything settled out and the Temperature and Humidity readings activated after a short period of time.

If I had to guess, I think the root cause of the borkage is that the persistent configuration settings for the Home app are stored in the cloud linked to your AppleID. If something doesn't quite match between the accessory you're adding to your home and what's already in the persistent configuration settings in the cloud things go wrong very quickly. I seem to recall that I gave each of the HomePod minis in my stereo pair unique names, like "Mini 1" and "Mini 2," which became a pair that I named "Mini Pair." I suspect that when the pair was updated and given default names of 'HomePod" the Home app couldn't resolve which persistent configuration to restore into each of the HomePods when they were updated. Once I deleted the persistence data (Step 4) I left everything with default names and everything seemed to be fine. When you create a stereo pair the setup provides a way to disambiguate which one is left and which one is having the same names for both does not matter.  Hopefully Apple will figure out how to handle updates without having to ungroup stereo pairs. Maybe they already have and something I did beforehand unintentionally triggered the whole mess, like renaming the HomePods.

Something is not right with the 16.3 update on HomePod mini. Went from infinite loop on the installation so I updated to 16.3 by connecting my minis to my Mac via USB-C and updating them using the restore feature. 

lkrupp said:

Regarding a physical security key, from where or whom does one obtain one?

Yubico is the maker of the YubiKey branded keys. They make several variations that mostly differ based on the interface style and connectors they support.