iOS 18 adds a rather small yet monumental change to how HomeKit works. It now lets you choose your preferred Home hub.
Sense Prevails – iOS 18 and tvOS 18 Lets You Choose Your Preferred Home Hub for Better Performance of Your HomeKit Setup
If you’re new to Apple’s smart home platform HomeKit, then you should know how it works.
If you want to control your smart home devices while you’re away, you need a Home hub. That ‘hub’ can be an Apple TV or a HomePod that stays connected to the internet, allowing you to control your lights, cameras, doorbells, what have you, when you’re away. This hub is also responsible for uploading video recordings and other data to Apple’s servers, too.
Since the beginning of time, iOS automatically selects which Apple TV or HomePod to use as a hub. You couldn’t choose which device to use as preferred hub. But, I’m pleased to report that in iOS 18, you can actually select which device to use as a preferred Home hub. Why is this important? It allows you to select a device that is better suited to handle your smart home devices. You’d want to choose a hub that is close to your router, offers better performance and it definitely shouldn’t be a HomePod mini sitting in an obscure corner of the house.
Here’s what the feature looks, like according to one user on Reddit:
Before you get super excited about this, do keep in mind that this feature is not available publicly, yet. In order to use it, you need to download and install iOS 18 beta, tvOS 18 beta and your HomePod must be running the latest beta software, too. It’s best to just wait this one wait until the software becomes publicly available later this year.
This feature has me super excited because it makes no sense to automatically set a preferred Home hub, although that option will remain available. I’ve had many issues with HomeKit over the years only because Apple believed choosing the slowest and farthest away HomePod was ideal for managing my smart home setup. With a manual toggle added to the menu, I can finally choose a hub that is hard-wired to my router that also offers amazing performance benefits.
