Domótica

My HomePod plays music by itself: causes and fixes

Carlos Sahuquillo · 22 enero, 2026 · 9 min de lectura

Ep. 105 · escúchalo 0:00 / 9:27

Today I want to talk to you about a global glitch that’s been giving some HomePods around the world a hard time for a few months now, especially the HomePod Mini… and well, I say it’s something global because it’s happening to people in lots of different countries… but it doesn’t happen on all HomePods, in fact it only happens to me on one of the 5 I have… and in my case it can more or less coincide with the rollout of iOS 26, but you can’t directly link it either, since there are people on Reddit talking about it for months now, so… no idea, but what’s clear is that, whether it’s because of iOS 26 or because of planned-more-than-obsolescence, a bunch of HomePods have suddenly started failing.

What to do if your HomePod plays music on its own

Check the Home app to see if there’s an automation, alarm, or scene triggering the playback.
Restart the HomePod from Home and update it to the latest available version.
If it happens again, factory reset it. On the HomePod mini you can also restore the firmware by connecting it via USB-C to a Mac or PC, following Apple’s official procedure.
If the touch panel generates phantom taps, the smart plug I explain further below works as a temporary fix, but it doesn’t repair the hardware.

The problem: a ghost is pressing the top

If your HomePod has suddenly stopped working or is behaving strangely, let me tell you that you’re not alone. If you do a search on Reddit you’ll see there are a ton of users reporting weird glitches, especially with the HomePod Mini. A few weeks ago it happened to Emilcar. In his case, one of his HomePods stopped responding as an accessory hub and he had to restore it… but restore it with the full process, which involves connecting it to a Mac and installing the firmware at a low level, then updating it again and so on… and it got fixed, he hasn’t told us about any more issues since. In my case, one night the music started playing on the HomePod Mini in my daughter’s room. She stopped it and went back to sleep like nothing had happened, but a little while later it started playing again… with Andrés Calamaro, which isn’t that bad, but it was already somewhat alarming and I unplugged it. What bugged me is that version 26.2 of the operating system had just come out the day before, and I thought it had been the update that, upon downloading, had restarted it and unpaused the music… but no. It bugs me that it’s happened to pretty much everyone starting more or less from HomePod OS 26, which is no longer called that but rather AudioOS 26, hinting that there will be a new system that isn’t just Audio but anyway… the thing is that now that all our HomePods are just under 3 years old, suddenly a bunch of them have broken all over the world. Either it’s a bug in version 26… or it’s a clear case of planned obsolescence, not from Apple this time but from some internal component. Anyway, I talked to the Apple Store at La Vaguada, which is the closest one to my house, gave them the serial number, and they told me it was no longer under warranty and the only thing I could do was buy another one. Sure, the gadget isn’t expensive, you can even find one on Wallapop at a good price, but there are rumors that a new HomePod Mini 2 is coming out in a few months (watch out, this can make our conspiracy theories grow even more, with someone pushing us to buy the new one…)… but anyway, the thing is I don’t think it’s a good time to buy a new HomePod Mini, so I had to figure out whether it was going in the trash or could be fixed somehow. Needless to say, I tried Emilcar’s method, plugged it into the Mac, and restored it in DFU mode or whatever it’s called on the HomePod… and a few days later it started acting up again. On top of that, it was clear that the HomePod thought someone was pressing the top, because if you cut the power and turn it back on, the LED on top starts spinning while it restarts… and sometimes it turns red and says it’s going to restore, which is what it does when you deliberately want to restore it, and the method is precisely that, pressing the top when you give it power again to start the reset process…. Either way, I had to find a way to fix it… or throw it in the trash to sleep the sleep of the just, of course.

So, this HomePod Mini is the one that wakes up my daughter. It does act as an accessory hub, yes, but you already know that with the high availability of accessory hubs in HomeKit (something Home Assistant doesn’t have, by the way), if one hub doesn’t respond but you have more, absolutely nothing happens. In fact, now you can tell the operating system if you have a preferred accessory hub, some HomePod you’re especially fond of because its color matches your eye color, or, in my case, some Apple TV compatible with Thread and with an ethernet cable, so I make sure it’s always connected even if there’s some wifi issue… but anyway, the point is that if this HomePod wasn’t always on, it wasn’t a big deal either. My daughter also doesn’t use it to listen to music, she sometimes tells it to turn the light on or off and not much more… but she does use it as an alarm clock, and as you know, in the mornings when it’s time to wake up, the light turns on gradually and music plays through the HomePods in the bedrooms… so as long as the HomePod was on at that time, that was more than enough as a degraded-mode business-continuity setup until we buy the new one and everything can go back to normal, so I connected it to a power strip I have from the Meross brand that has 4 outlets (and is Matter-compatible — honestly I really like this power strip and it works wonderfully without being overpriced)… and what I do is keep that outlet without power all day until the alarm time arrives… at that moment, the light turns on and, instead of playing music immediately, it powers the outlet, waits 1 minute, and sends the music to the HomePod Mini, turning it off again after 5 minutes. Yes, I know it’s a janky solution, but that’s exactly what it is, a workaround, a patch, until the new HomePod Mini comes out, expected for March or April, hell, it’s not a big deal either. My future self has added this little bit here because Charly, a namesake from the Telegram group who’s also a neighbor and friend, sent me a YouTube video about how to take apart the top of the HomePod Mini and disconnect the top touch panel. This has its downsides because you can no longer tap it to summon Siri without saying «Hey Lola,» or to raise/lower the volume and so on, but you can still use it all day, send it music, change the volume from the device or by asking Siri, and things like that… the thing is Charly is very handy, he really likes tinkering with tiny things… I’m used to handling huge things, you know, so I know that if I try to take the HomePod apart I’m going to mess it up and it’ll probably end up in the trash… but well, since it’s already broken I might as well give it a shot, here we go. Anyway, with my janky workaround, which you can do with a smart power strip, a smart plug, or a Shelly controlling an outlet, or however you like, for now I’ve solved the problem. None of these nights, when it turns on to play the alarm, has it done the spinning red light thing to restart. Just in case it had fixed itself, I tried leaving it plugged in all day… and it’s not like it does it all the time, not even every day, but sometimes it gives you a scare and turns on by itself… and the jerk only turns on by itself at night, it’s not like it plays music at noon, it much prefers turning on at night. I told my daughter, who is 10 years old right now, the truth — that the HomePod was working great but that someone or something comes by at night to touch it, and that’s why it turns on… now she sleeps a lot more peacefully, as you can imagine. Yeah, well, and you can also imagine my wife’s scolding for telling the kid this. Honestly, neither of them has a sense of humor.