How to Set Your Preferred Apple Home Hub

If you have multiple HomePods or Apple TVs in your smart home, you may notice that the Home app doesn't always pick the most centrally located or the most powerful home hub. This can lead to slower response times and disconnections, and it may even break Matter device automation. To better optimize your smart home, you'll need to know how to set your preferred Apple Home hub.

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If you have multiple HomePods or Apple TVs in your smart home, you may notice that the Home app doesn't always pick the most centrally located or the most powerful home hub. This can lead to slower response times and disconnections, and it may even break Matter device automation.

To better optimize your smart home, you'll need to know how to set your preferred Apple Home hub. It only takes a trip to the Apple Home app and a few taps to make the change—we'll show you how.

Why You Should Set Your Preferred Apple Home Hub

Apple homepod room example

As we just mentioned, the Apple Home app isn't the best at picking home hubs since it doesn't know the layout of your home. This leads to instances where an Apple TV in the basement or a HomePod at the front of your home takes over.

It goes without saying that for the best performance, you'll want your home hub to be in the center of your home. That way, the signals from wireless Matter devices won't have to travel through several walls to reach their destination.

Another thing that will make a big impact on the reliability and speed of your smart home is choosing a hub that you can wire via Ethernet. This of course means going with an Apple TV 4K (2nd gen or 3rd gen Wi-Fi+Ethernet) for your smart home needs.

In addition to avoiding wireless interference and the general instability that comes with Wi-Fi, your smart home will benefit from the insane processing power that comes with the Apple TV's A-series chips. The Apple TV is seriously overpowered and more than capable of handling both Matter Controller and Thread Border Router duties, so you won't need to worry about overloading it with Thread-based devices anytime soon.

Setting Your Apple Home Hub: What You’ll Need

Apple matter home hubs lifestyle

While Apple has finally graced us with the ability to set our preferred home hub, it isn't available to everyone as of yet. This is because the setting requires the latest version of the Apple Home app found in iOS 18 and tvOS 18—both of which are currently in beta.

We generally do not recommend that users put beta software on their primary devices—especially considering how important home hubs are to maintaining your smart home. However, if you are willing to take the plunge, you can access the new feature now once all of your devices are updated.

Once you update you may have some trouble tracking down the feature if you have a HomePod. Since HomePods are a little behind in the beta process, you may need to remove them before the option will appear.

Don't worry though, once you disable Automatic Hub Selection—which is on by default—you can safely add your HomePods back to your home. The option will stick around, but HomePods will now be listed as "unavailable" until they get their update.

How to Set Your Preferred Apple Home Hub in the Home App

How to enable automatic hub selection steps 1

Setting your preferred home hub is quick and easy. When you are ready, you'll need to head over to the Apple Home app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

  • Launch the Apple Home app.
  • Tap the … button near the top of your screen.
  • Tap Home Settings.

How to enable automatic hub selection steps 2

  • Scroll down and tap Home Hubs & Bridges.
  • Tap the Automatic Selection toggle to turn it off.
  • Tap your preferred Home Hub.

After making your selection, it may take a few moments before it appears as your active hub in the Home app. You may also encounter a brief period of unresponsiveness from your devices.

Once the changes are applied, the Home app will automatically prioritize your chosen hub whenever you reboot your network or after losing power.

How to Enable Apple Home Automatic Hub Selection

If you wish to revert back to automatic hub selection, you can do so at any time. Once again, you'll start the process by launching the Apple Home app.

  • Launch the Apple Home app.
  • Tap the … button near the top of your screen.
  • Tap Home Settings.
  • Scroll down and tap Home Hubs & Bridges.
  • Tap the Automatic Selection toggle to turn it on.

From now on, Apple will manage your home hubs quietly in the background. Whenever a hub reboots or goes down, Apple will switch to the next best option for your home.

Optimize Your Smart Home By Setting Your Preferred Home Hub

As great as Apple's Home app is at making everything just work, it isn't quite so great at picking the best home hub. So when your Matter motion sensors slow down or your smart plugs drop connections, your first troubleshooting step should be checking the active home hub.

The chances are, you'll find that your home hub switched to a HomePod off in a faraway corner or to an Apple TV that isn't hardwired. Now that you know how to set your preferred home hub, you'll never have to worry about this issue again.