Apple Releases HomePod Software 17.4 With Music Preference Update

Funny how as of today, Spotify has still not elected to add itself to the HomePod, showing they are intentionally being stubborn and malicious. Everyone else has, but them.

Is it safe to update the OG HomePod(s)?

All this Spotify issue in the courts and they don’t even support music on the HomePod?

Early updates to OG would often brick them. Those of us early adopters are still very gun-shy on updates as a result.

Mine, once again lucky, still works after this update. Two OG Hpods from their initial release by Apple....

I’m going to pass on these updates for a bit. My wife and I purchased a bunch of smart plugs from Meross to power dumb devices after going with Phillips Hue bulbs for the main lights in our house so we have several lamps and a couple of fans that use the HomeKit compatible version of these devices to control them and make them smart and it seems like every time there is a new beta version of iOS that is a point release ahead of the current version that those devices stop working in the Home App and I have to use the Meross app to control them. When they stop working for me they stop working for my wife as well so she has the app to fall back on too. Then at some point near the end of the development cycle the devices all start working again in the Home app but the process seems to then repeat when I update to latest pubic release of the HomePod firmware and it’s another month or more before things settle down and start working again

Why this would happen is beyond me. You’d think there’d only be issues if we were installing HomePod or tvOS updates as each of those can act as the Home Hub but this has become a well established pattern for the last year plus now for whatever reason.

Just in the last two weeks things started working for both my wife and I with her on 17.3 and with me on the 17.4 beta releases. Both of us can use the Home app and Siri again to control those plugs and I know as soon as she updated her iPhone to v17.4 if she hasn’t already and/or I update the HomePods to v17.4 and/or tvOS then it’ll start happening again and it’ll be another month before things get back to normal. I’m tired of it. Unless there’s some major security issue I’m keeping my device on v17.3 for a while and hope that if there are issues Meross puts out firmware updates for their smart plugs to fix them which is another pattern I’ve noticed. Usually at some point after a release of the latest version of the HomePod OS / tvOS there seems to be a firmware update for those smart plugs that comes along and then boom, right away or within a few days things work normally again.

It’s to the point where I’m considering ditching the smart plugs and going to Phillips Hue bulbs for all lights and a new brand of smart plugs for those few devices left that aren’t lights like the fans. I’ll worry about more smart plugs for our Christmas lights next year if I find a brand that is more stable than these Meross plugs. It’s just so strange because none of the reviews and very few forum posts on their website describe the issues I’ve been having with them since we first started buying them and if they weren’t so inexpensive I would’ve replaced them a while ago but I guess you get what you pay for.

HomeKit is brittle af if you have many devices.

I went through the trouble of assigning them all static ips, based on their MAC address. It's an ordeal takes all afternoon to track down and get right. The "Discovery" app in the Mac App Store is a huge help, so is arp -a on the command line, and even just hovering over your Airport (if you have Airports, otherwise you've probably got an even better wifi router interface) in the AirPort Utility to find clients and their dns names/MAC addresses.

I've got about 65 smart devices on my home wifi. About 25 of those were new after a big reno, where I just let them do DHCP. Everything was working like crap. To the point it was affecting my wifi network.

The amount of DNS/bonjour level noise and knock-on wifi and HK messaging noise generated by all these dynamic IPs is truly disruptive.

Especially considering a lot of smart devices don't provide a unique bonjour name, and when you have multiple the first to connect gets VenderCoDevice.local, while the second gets VendercoDevice-1.local, when the next time they renew things can work out where they swap. And now you're in error-correction hell, hoping the vendors do timely and intelligent error reporting/timeouts, and that this works well with the caching on your various HK hubs. And not to mention if you've got an appletv and a homepod in the same HomeKit Room, frequently their default naming will wind up competing for the same Roomname.local/Roomname-1.local name.

It's a nightmare. But it all goes away if you assign static IPs and where you can different network names (not always possible with all vendors).

Last weekend I tracked down all their MAC addresses and assigned static IPs and HK and my network are steady as a rock again.

You ABSOLUTELY should not need to do this.

You ABSOLUTELY need to do this if you want stability for a large number of HK wifi devices.

Sure. I do every update, including now. Why wouldn't it be?

Because in the past lots of folks had the original Homepods bricked by updating. I have never updated mine AFAIK.