Temporary HomeKit glitch with Scene-based Automations

A few weeks ago, in the episode from January 10th, I told you that in HomeKit it’s better to create an Automation that contains a Scene than to create an Automation with the devices loose in there, so it’s always better to create Scenes grouping devices and actions. This has many advantages, not just the speed at which they run since with a scene all the devices receive the action at once, while with a normal Automation they receive it sequentially. We can also invoke the scene with Siri without having to run the automation, etc, in the episode from the 10th I talked about all this. Well, the thing is that last week, some of these automations that contained scenes stopped working for no apparent reason. It was quite funny because if you ran the scene manually it worked fine, but if you ran the automation from that little button below the automation that says ‘Test this automation,’ it would start running it and show an Error… and that’s it. Yeah, sure, that whole idea from Steve Jobs about «It simply works» and the user having to be abstracted from the technology behind it is all well and good, but damn it, a log to know what the hell is failing to cause that error… would come in really handy in some cases. But no, the Home app tells you ‘Error’ and off you go. For those of you using the paid version of Controller for Homekit, which you already know is my favorite app for managing devices, automations, and notifications in HomeKit, you’ll know we have a section called Maintenance that shows information that can help us diagnose issues. By the way, these days I’m working on a BCP, a Business Continuity Plan for a European organization… and they really don’t like the word «incidencia,» they made me change it to «issue.» Anyway. The thing is that in the Maintenance menu of Controller for HomeKit you can see, for example, if you have unreachable devices, although the Home app tells you that too. If you have devices with low battery, the Home app also tells you that, but by the time it does, the device might have 10 minutes of battery left—it always tells you too late, or it just shows it as unreachable without ever warning you it had low battery… and it shows it right there in the Home app itself, mind you. It doesn’t even send you a notification like ‘Heads up, you have some devices with low battery, open the app to see which ones’… I don’t even expect a notification like ‘This device has low battery’ anymore, that would already be fantasy, but the Home app doesn’t do that because we have to be abstracted from the technology and from dead batteries. Well, you already know that with Home Assistant we can also get this low battery notification, a few weeks ago I also talked about it here. Anyway, so in Controller’s Maintenance menu we can find very useful information… but in this case, if you went into the Automations section within the Maintenance menu, it didn’t show any error, everything OK. And if you looked at the Scenes section (which is what Controller calls Ambientes even though they’re the same thing), it also showed as if everything was OK. Controller does have a Log that gives you all the information about what’s happening, but honestly I don’t use it for that very reason, because it gives you all the information about what’s happening… meaning you have every sensor reporting in real time every second the battery status (low or not), temperatures, humidity levels, negative smoke detection… all of that in real time, it’s like capturing traffic on the device network… and it’s crazy trying to see anything there. Being someone who’s always been into the black screen, I really miss being able to do a grep or a tcpdump filter or something like that to filter just for what I’m interested in… so in the end, I don’t use the log at all. After investigating for a while and confirming there really wasn’t a clear reason why it was failing, I ended up going on Reddit… and bingo, some users were complaining about the same issue. You already know me, the first thing I thought was ‘well, no big deal, let’s migrate back to Home Assistant, I’ll disable the automations in HomeKit and enable the automations from Home Assistant.’ That is, what I always do whenever I get fed up with one of the two platforms… until I get fed up with the other one again and migrate back to the first. Thankfully in my case this migration takes 10 minutes, just enabling and disabling things respectively. But I didn’t do it right then and thought ‘I’ll do it tomorrow, whenever’… and you know what? The next day everything was working fine. Just like that, for no reason, without restarting the iPhone or the accessory hubs, no new firmware version, no press release from Apple apologizing for having been too busy with that damn robot they showed off shaped like the Pixar lamp to pay attention to the errors in the HomeKit platform… but they did something to make the errors fix themselves. And these kinds of things really bug me. Sure, okay, it’s not as bad as that Home Assistant meltdown at the beginning of the year that left all our zigbee devices unreachable and we had to do stuff to get them back. But I don’t know, damn it, an Apple page where they tell you these things, some kind of forum or GitHub where they explain there’s an error in a service and that it gets fixed shortly after… a lot of services offer this information practically in real time. But no, at Apple you have to be abstracted from the technology. It’s great that you don’t have to do anything for it to get fixed… but it would be even better to be informed and know that you don’t have to do anything for it to get fixed, instead of spending an hour looking for the cause of the failure, changing automations, and searching on Reddit.