Long story short, a VPN might turn your Apple Home home upside down. I don’t even know how this is possible. It happened to me, but I know this should not be allowed to happen.
A few days ago, I downloaded a VPN to access ChatGPT from my country where it was stupidly blocked for data privacy reasons. Right after downloading it and using it for a few days, no problems whatsoever on the Home app. Until I bought a new iPad and upgraded it to 16.4 from the previous version. 2 hours after everything disconnects, every single device was unresponsive. I took the usual steps to try and fix the issue: restart the router, restart the hubs and my iDevices. Nothing helped. So, I did the unthinkable and deleted my home using the official Apple profile to clear every bit of data on the device and iCloud, then created a new home and painstakingly went through adding all HomeKit devices back to the Home app. Half a day after, all devices started being unresponsive again, some of which even started disappearing from the Home app. I called it a day and tried again the following morning, but the same thing happened again. I then opened a level 2 support ticket with Apple. The support team suggested disabling the VPN and deleting the entire profile and VPN app from all of my devices and creating a new home from scratch for the third time. Now, knock on wood, everything has been working great again and I dare say even faster and more reliably. Devices are snappier and my Wi-Fi is considerably faster as well. I’m sure some leftover traces of old devices and homes must have bogged it down a bit. I even took the opportunity of rebuilding my entire Homebridge setup, with a new micro SD card. The previous one I believe might have gone faulty because it wouldn’t save any changes made to Homebridge UI if I ever needed to reboot the Raspberry PI. So, I hope you never have to go through this unimaginable frustration, but sometimes, like in life, starting a new can lead to a better home.
It’s because you can’t control your HomeKit hubs that apple home uses, because of that your new iPad probably acted as a home hub but was on a tunnelled vpn that could not connect to your other HomeKit devices that were added without a vpn and therefore using a different gateway. You didn’t need to delete profiles, but you should learn how to separate your network into different subnets to isolate the vpn and use split tunnelling.
Also apple really needs to let people select their hubs, the only way to get close is removing the hub from the network, waiting for it to change to the one you want then reconnect and hope the hub you want stays as the primary…it’s so dumb.
Great to hear it’s working better than it did before! I’m curious, what VPN provider did you go with? I’m using a VPN on my iDevices + M2 Mac Mini and concerned 
I dont think iPads act as home hub anymore
As of iOS 16, iPads don’t act as home hubs anymore
Then you thought wrong, because they do.
Actually, iPads are still supported as home hubs in iOS/iPadOS 16, as long as you don’t upgrade to the new HomeKit architecture (since it’s considered a separate, optional upgrade).
Really? I thought they weren’t any longer because the section in Settings is gone.
I’m still on 16.4. Currently afraid to upgrade to 16.4.1.
Then the “report” is wrong, because I can see the iPad as a home hub on the latest iOS now. (16.4.1)
Also if you actually read the article it says from the code it indicates…the title is misleading.
Have you upgraded to the new HomeKit architecture at all?
are you on new architecture or you stayed on old one? I moved to new one and I no longer see my
iPad as home hub. Only apple tv…
I did back when it first released with iOS 16.2. Never had any issues when I did.
You can’t use iPads as hubs on the new architecture, but can if you haven’t upgraded.
Right, so since you upgraded, that means you can no longer use iPad as a home hub. Only those who did not upgrade to the new architecture can still use iPad as a home hub.
