How to upgrade to the new Apple Home architecture

With the release of iOS 16.2 this week, you can now upgrade your Apple HomeKit smart home to a new underlying architecture, which Apple says “will improve the performance and reliability of the accessories in your home.”

This new foundation for Apple’s smart home was first announced at WWDC and is part of the company’s preparation for Matter, the new smart home interoperability standard.

Apple’s been preparing for this for a while. First came the all-new Home app with iOS 16, then iOS 16.1 brought support for Matter. Now, with iOS 16.2, Apple Home is getting a ground-up, under-the-hood rebuild.

This all sounds exciting, especially to anyone plagued by “Accessory not responding” notifications in the Home app and / or slow response times...

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