HomeKit in iOS 18 lets you choose your preferred Home Hub

HomeKit gives users more choice in what controls their smart home network in iOS 18 by choosing a device that acts as the active Home Hub.

HomeKit prefers to have a Home Hub, a device designated as the main point of contact on the network for all other hardware. There may be multiple devices in your home that can act as a Home Hub, but you haven’t previously been able to designate one of them as the primary device for this task.

In practice, this meant rotating the allocation, sometimes to a device on the network periphery.

Although Apple mentioned many changes to HomeKit in its keynote, the HomeKit subreddit is on Reddit noticed an unannounced change in the Home app.

Users can now select “Preferred Home Hub” in the Home app. The user can determine which potential Home Hub is the primary one from a list of potential devices.

If your preferred option becomes disconnected or unavailable, HomeKit will switch to one of the others until the selected device becomes available again.

Users may find the option to select a Preferred Home Hub useful. For example, they can set newer devices as designated Home Hubs instead of older hardware.

If the connection to the Home Hub device is slow, this option also ensures that the device is only used as a backup.

The change appears in the Home app on iOS 18, but requires beta software to be installed on HomePod and Apple TV devices to work.