How to Remedy HomeKit Scene Returning Unresponsive Error

by Rian

After adding some number of accessories to the HomeKit, my HomePod usually returns ‘some accessories were unresponsive’ error, even though the scene is correctly set. Same goes with Macs and iPhones. I can see there is some latency, but it’s nearly impossible to troubleshoot as HomeKit generally does not have troubleshooting guidelines aside from generic ones.

Solutions

There is one remedy I found to be working consistently. If you already have accessories added on the HomeKit platform, there is a good chance it also supports Matter. And, for reasons unknown, when accessories are registered through Matter, HomeKit seems to have longer grace period for latency than native HomeKit-enabled devices. For obvious reasons, it wouldn’t work if the majority of the devices do not support Matter.

Afterthoughts

In my case, I use a lot of Philips Hue devices, and they are all HomeKit enabled. In recent updates, Hue Bridge started supporting Matter. The unfortunate downside of using this remedy is that migrating over to Matter would result in losing existing scenes and accessories settings over at HomeKit side. And the scenes toggled over Matter takes effects gradually, one device at a time, instead of all at once.

I suspect there are many factors at play here. When HomeKit was first launched, consumer-grade mesh routers were beginning to be hit the shelves; whereas, in 2025, mesh routers are easy to come by. The number of IoT has vastly increased as well. Perhaps the primary focus has shifted to maintaining operability with Matter platform. Anyone of them can cause the issue, and I can only hope there will be some future updates that will address this issue.