I felt a real sense of deja-vu recently, when I told one of my HomePods to run a scene and Siri responded with “You’ll need to continue on your personal device.” This is a message many of us will remember from 2020 … and 2021 … and 2022. Welcome to the new year – same as the old year.
But more than just an annoyance, this is, to me, an encapsulation of the biggest problem with smart home tech in general, and HomeKit in particular …
Don’t misunderstand me: I love smart home technology, and I love being able to handle almost all of it through Siri and/or the Home app. I rely on it from waking to going to sleep.
At 7 a.m. on weekdays, my bedroom blind opens a little – and only a little – to ease me gently into the world of the waking. A little later, my robocleaner takes care of the hoovering, again on a weekday schedule. When I’m ready to face the prospect of moving to my desk, a single verbal command configures several lights to a warm and not overly-bright light setup in my office, and it automatically switches to brighter and cooler lighting when it’s time for me to actually start work.
At the other end of the day, the command “Hey Siri, I’m going to bed” switches off all of the living room lights, switches on low-level lighting in my bedroom, and closes the bedroom blind.
Or, at least, it should. I mean, it does if I ask my Watch or my phone, but the past few days my HomePods have started with the “You’ll need to continue on your personal device” business.
This unhelpful error message used to mean that you’d asked HomePod to handle a “personal request” – like reading a text message or letting you know your next appointment – without toggling on that feature in the Home app. Fixing it wasn’t exactly intuitive, but it was at least a one-off process:
- Open the Home app
- Long-press the HomePod concerned
- Scroll all the way to the bottom
- Tap the settings (gear) icon
- Scroll to close to the bottom
- Tap Personal Requests
- Toggle it on
But not the 2023 version of the message. The 2023 version appears to be the Apple equivalent of the infamous Windows error message “Something went wrong.”
Indeed, before I updated my HomePods to 16.2, my iPhone didn’t even offer me the option of continuing there.
I’ve been getting the same unhelpful response for days now. I’ve restarted everything, and ensured everything is updated, but still no luck. And I know it’s not just me, as colleagues are also experiencing the same thing.
Top comment by Fookes Dafforne
Great article, Ben. I, like many others, have had massive issues with the 16.2 update. As your article rightfully mentions though, many of these issues stretch well before this last update. When Apple's oft-used phrase of 'It just works' rears its head my heart sinks! HomePods have never been 'right' in my house. We have frequent episodes like the one you mention, as well as frequent drops in connection, inability to handoff music from iPhones to HomePods - the list goes on.
It's all well and good Apple banging the drum and self-congratulating on their service offerings but until they get the fundamentals right on their hardware and software offerings like HomePod, folks looking to get in to the Apple Smart Home eco-system will rightfully look elsewhere. Whilst other platforms are not without their issues, Apple are charging a premium to have similar frustrations to their cheaper counterparts. Why would you spend the extra coinage on ill-thought out, poorly executed devices?
Now, we’re techies. We understand that glitches happen. It’s annoying, but we sigh and troubleshoot, and if that doesn’t fix it, we know that an update probably will soon. It’s also hardly a life-and-death matter that I have to ask my phone rather than my HomePod to save me the trouble of pressing actual buttons.
But I know from the reactions of non-techy friends to this sort of thing that it puts them off the whole idea of smart home tech. It doesn’t matter that it works 99% of the time, this is what they remember about it. And it really doesn’t help when Apple – the company which is supposed to make all this stuff friendly – can have Siri simply shrug and respond in such an unhelpful and uninformative way.
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