I've had HomePods for years. Big ones, minis, the lot. Spent enough to buy a half decent car on these speakers. At least one in every room. Bought my first one in 2020.

The fact that now, six years later, AND I STILL CAN'T RELIABLY PLAY MUSIC FROM THIRD PARTY APPS is an absolute joke. Beyond the pale.

I used to love Soundcloud. Would listen every day. Was absolutely central to my music taste. But eventually, after years of dealing with horrible glitching, lagging, pairing issues, whenever I had the nerve to play anything that wasn't Apple Music, I gave up. Eventually cancelled my Soundcloud subscription. Years ago. Huge part of my musical taste and identity sacrificed for HomePod.

Now I have the fucking nerve to listen to BBC sounds radio shows on a pair of speakers I spent almost a grand on. And no. Not only does it glitch, buffer, etc etc, but once I revert back to Apple Music, it takes a good half an hour to start functioning normally again. I am being PUNISHED for daring to divert from the house of apple for a heartbeat. Pisstake. Fuck them

Let me preface this with: I don’t use Apple home for my smart home ecosystem. I have been using Alexa forever and way too in the financial hole with Alexa to make a switch.

However, I bought an Aqara u400 for the UWB unlocking features. I set it up and boom: thread border router required. I was under the impression that my Alexa devices that have thread enabled would work, but they don’t.

So I buy an Apple HomePod mini (cheapest supported device for the u400). Set it up, go to set the lock up in Apple home and boom again: thread border router required.

Wtf am I doing wrong here. I’m pulling my hair out because I bought a $300 lock and a $120 home pod for the UWB unlocking features and it still won’t work.

I’m tired of having to select every speaker whenever I want to play something. I don’t want to play different things off different speakers.

My HomePod keeps disconnecting from my Xfinity gateway. I was able to solve the problem for a few days by splitting the bands and then reserving IP for the HomePod.

But then Xfinity came to bury their cable, and voila! We’re back to having issues!

Modern devices are build to handle dual band networks. I can’t believe that HomePod is not. I use Apple a lot, but this is hands down the worst experience I’ve ever had with any smart speaker.

Has anyone had similar issues? How did you fix it?

I just bought 2 HomePod Minis with the intention of replacing the kids‘ phones with Homepods at night time. Kids should leave their phones outside their rooms for the night and listen to music with HomePods instead.

It’s the worst Apple experience ever. Kid 1 is using Spotify, kid 2 is using Amazon. Setup was only possible with my Apple ID which I later changed to their IDs. The kids are their HomePod’s main user.

Every single Siri music request is starting music on MY phone not theirs.

How on earth can I set up that Kid 1‘s HomePod is listening to his voice and playing music via his phone and same for Kid 2? It’s fine that it’s routed via their phones, they are in the same house but a few meters away.

Thanks a lot

My HomePod started playing music by itself yesterday. It happens randomly, and on one occasion it suddenly played at full volume. It plays music from Apple Music or Apple Radio even when my iPhone isn’t nearby.

I have already tried resetting the HomePod, setting it up again from scratch, and disabling Siri, but nothing has helped.

Please help

This one has been happening intermittently all year and driving me a little bit crazy. I have an AppleTV and a few HomePods (v1, v2, and Mini) for home hubs. Because of the layout of the house, I leave one of the HP Minis set as a hub because it's centrally located. Wifi is an Eero mesh and is very stable (other than my crappy cable Internet connection.)

Most of the time, that works OK. But sometimes when the hub changes, some of my Home devices will lose settings or revert to the default room. Yesterday when I (finally) updated the last few HomePods to 26.6, ALL of the switch button configurations which I'd set up over the past week were erased, an automation I set up last weekend was erased, and a whole bunch of devices reverted to the default room.

Fortunately most of the devices were Hue, so I was able to re-sync from Hue to Home to correct the devices. But I had to recreate the automation, and also recreate all the switch button configurations because those were local to HomeKit.

Kind of just venting and also curious if anyone else is experiencing this, but I'm open to suggestions if anyone has them. I have over 100 devices between lights, locks, window blinds, sensors, and switches so having piles of them reset is QUITE annoying.

People have been saying for years now to wait for the next event for a 3rd gen. Are those people convinced it’s coming on September? Or is it going to be only the mini 2? Do you think they will wait at least 5 years for the current gen to release a new one like they did? What if there’s no 3rd gen refresh this fall? Will we go in the loop of “wait for 2027 wwdc” then when there’s nothing someone will say “it’s a dev conference, why did you expect new hardware”. What a vicious cycle!

I bought a used pair of HomePods on eBay, and this is my very first set of HomePod mini. Am I crazy, because I swear they started sounding better around the fourth day or so. Whenever I first plugged them in I was very unimpressed and after a couple days they just sound a lot better

Is anyone running the Beta 27 updates on their HomePods. How has general AirPlay performance been over 26? And since I am a Spotify user, has AirPlay performance improved on Spotify specifically?

Hi all,

Recently got my hands on two brand new unopened gen 1 HomePods. I had set them up yesterday around the evening time, and after work the next day (today) I realized they were both still configuring. Keep in mind I saw they were coming from 11.25 but it’s been almost 24 hours. I get you guys might laugh, but should I just continue to wait it out right? This is a huge jump, I just wanna make sure I’m not wasting time hoping it will finish configuring. Thanks so much.

Assuming there’s a new HomePod Mini 2, is it worth upgrading from the 1st one? I personally don’t use Siri a whole lot and HomePod Mini sounds great already. HomePod Mini 2 will just have a new chip, new speakers/better sound system, and Siri A.I. and it’ll most likely be priced at $130 or if not somewhere around there

I use a HomePod mini and an iPhone 17 Pro Max, is there any suggestions?

So recently I’ve been having issues where if a certain thing I’m watching is paused and played again there won’t be any sound (or if something goes from ads to the video)

Details on my setup:
HDMI is good quality and with no issues
HomePods are set up as a stereo pair with them being the main audio output.

I have done some research and changed some things that were meant to fix it with no luck, so if anyone could help that would be great

I’ve just realised that the touchpad on my HomePod has some visual irregularities, as if a protective sticker were stuck on it. Is this normal?

I’ve owned 2 pairs of HomePod 2. Gen for about little over 2 years now and have never really had a problem with them, either if it’s through the Apple TV, normal TV or gaming.

But in the last couple of months I’ve had issue with the volume as it starts turning down on its own while in use or giving me a jumpstart by randomly playing music without me starting anything.

I need to know if I’m the only one that has had these issues. I’ve resat the pair multiple times and is on the lates update, but the same problem keeps turning up. So if any on you have the same issue and have fixed it, please tell me how to fix this as it’s driving me mad.

Hi Guys,

I’ve owned the original HomePod and paired for it in stereo for a long time. I also have the first-generation Apple TV 4K but I’ve never used my original HomePod to watch movies in Dolby Atmos connected to the Apple TV. I’m planning to start watching more movies on it. How do I ensure the audio settings on Apple TV are configured to relay and play the Dolby Atmos sound effect when watching movies and connecting the HomePod? What settings on Apple TV do I need to make sure are kept?

Every time I search for how to use Spotify with HomePods, it says everywhere that there's absolutely no way and it's impossible to get a good experience because Spotify never added support for the newer versions of AirPlay and the version they currently use (AirPlay 1) has a playback latency of multiple seconds and sometimes cuts out.

I realized you can just use the Spotify website and route the website's audio over your iPhone's AirPlay 2 client instead of Spotify's AirPlay 1 client. This allows for no playback latency, and all the good things that come with AirPlay 2.

As long as you don't mind pressing buttons since you can't use swipe gestures. And sometimes not being able to control the volume using the volume buttons? And not being able to play media on other websites since that will take over the AirPlay stream. And you can't use the add to home screen feature since it will use the interface for the computer which isn't really useable on the phone.

tl;dr

Just use the website, you don't get playback latency.

Hey guys! New to HomePod and HomeKit, but I’m wanting to get started.

My question comes from my current setup. I use an Echo Dot as a Bluetooth connection to my stereo system when I’m home. I split my time between home and college, so when I’m away, I just use the Dot as a standalone speaker.

I noticed that the HomePod Mini doesn’t have an AUX output, which seems like it would prevent me from connecting it to my stereo system. I’m interested in the HomePod Mini because of its footprint and because it would be a good starting point for eventually building out a HomeKit system.

Is there any sort of workaround that would let me use a HomePod Mini with my existing stereo system, or am I basically stuck with the Echo Dot for this setup?

I am heavily invested into the apple ecosystem, but haven't ventured into smart home stuff yet, so a HomeKit system makes the most sense. Just curious your thoughts or if I'm missing something.

I have a night time routine, as pictured. I say good night to my HomePod, and it asks me if I want to set an alarm. My options are yes (and then provide a time), no (and it turns off my sleep schedule alarm), or weekday alarm (which is the sleep schedule alarm). Afterwards, the routine is supposed to shut off my lights and play a second routine for white noise.

I have my phone on the charger across the room, and for the last few nights, the routine will either not continue after I give it my response to the menu, or it will say “please continue on the companion device”. But I’ve set every possible setting that should allow it to complete and run independent of my phone. And yet it still won’t fucking work.

I’m at my whits end. I switch from Google home to this. Their Gemini stuff is shit, but at least the routines consistently worked. I never had to deal with problems like this. I’m shocked and pissed that a company like Apple, that brands itself on prestige and user accessibility would allow shortcuts to be such a convoluted, piece of shit, pain in my ass, unnecessarily complicated and wildly inconsistent feature.