One of the best pandemic purchases I’ve made has been a HomePod Mini. One of the many reasons that I’ve liked it is I can use a Home automation to set a playlist or album to wake up to. This corrects an annoyance with the iPhone’s Alarms app, where you need to download a song to your device to reliably use it as an alarm.
However, I recently got a new iPhone which broke my alarm automation. I couldn’t figure out what was going on: I deleted and re-created the automation a few times and totally restarted the HomePod Mini. Neither of these actions helped. Not only did the automation not work at the designated times but the automation wouldn’t even work while using the test feature.
The settings for the automation were:
- Enable This Automation (Only when I am home): On
- When: Weekdays at a given time (Only when I am home)
- Scenes: Weekday morning
- Accessories: HomePod Mini
- Media: Play Audio (Designated playlist, Shuffle, Set Custom Volume)
No matter what I did, the automation never fired. However, I figured out that as soon as I disabled the location-specific triggers the automation worked. This helped me to start narrowing down the problem and how to correct it.
You see, when I moved all of my data to my new iPhone it failed to transfer a setting that told the Home app to use my iPhone as the location to from which to trigger events. As a result, setting an automation to only fire when I was home couldn’t work because the device which had been triggering the Home automation (i.e., my old iPhone) wasn’t never geolocated to my network. You can fix this, however, by opening: Settings >> Privacy >> Location Services (On) >> Share My Location >> My Location (Set to “This Device).
You can fix this by opening: Settings >> Privacy >> Location Services (On) >> Share My Location >> My Location (Set to “This Device”)
Now that the Home app knows to use my iPhone’s location as the way of determining whether I’m at home, the trigger fires reliably.
For the past weeks I’ve had outrageously bad battery life on my iPhone 7, running iOS 11. A lot of the battery drain was from the Podcasts app (approx. 24-33%) but I couldn’t figure out why the drain rate was so high: even when I only streamed over Bluetooth or Airplay I’d had the same power drain percentages, so it didn’t seem to be linked to powering the speaker on the phone (which can impact battery life significantly).
Excited Pixels 