With the Home app on iOS 18, you now have the choice of which device you want to use as your default Home hub to control all your HomeKit accessories and automations. This is really handy if, for example, you have an unreliable connection on some devices, but maybe you’ve got a particular HomePod that always has a great connection to the internet. You can now choose that as your default hub.

All I’m going to do is tap on the Options button in the top right-hand corner and then go to Home Settings. From here, we’re looking for the Hubs and Bridges option, and you can see that, at the moment, it’s automatically selecting which hub it wants to use. This is perfect for most people because it will choose the one with the best signal or the one that’s most up to date.

But, as soon as all of your Home hubs are running iOS 18 or later, you can then turn this toggle off, and you can pick whichever hub you want to use. So, for example, I can switch to using my Lounge HomePod instead as the main hub, and you’ll see that update at the top of the screen shortly afterwards. If your home hub can’t be reached for any reason, HomeKit will still fall back to another option, so you’re not limiting your choices here. But it does mean you can specify your preference for the first time ever.

And if you want to go back to full automatic mode, just turn that toggle back on—nice and easy!

Now that iOS 18 has been released, there are so many more things that your phone can do that it simply couldn’t do before. I spent my summer playing with iOS 18, and I’ve made a ton of QuickTip videos on my channel down below. But excitingly, I’ve also written my first eBook! I’ve called it 100 QuickTips for iOS 18, and if you follow the link below, I promise you’ll find things that you never knew your phone could do now that you’ve updated to iOS 18. I’ll see you next time!