Declutter your Apple smart home by getting rid of old devices. If you use your smart home on Apple's HomeKit platform, where the Apple Home app acts as a conductor, orchestrating your symphony of lights, sensors, locks, cameras, and more, then you want to keep everything in harmony. Unfortunately, over time your collection of HomeKit accessories may become cluttered with relics of the past; devices that no longer serve their purpose or have simply lost their connection and are labeled No response in the Home app. In this guide, we'll show you how to breathe new life into your Apple Home by cleaning up and removing unnecessary, old, and unresponsive HomeKit accessories.

Uninstall and Uninstall HomeKit Accessories in the Apple Home App

In the screenshots above, you can see that our Apple Home has been somewhat neglected and we live with quite a few unresponsive HomeKit accessories. The good news is that it only takes a few minutes to get rid of these old, unused, unnecessary, and sometimes downright broken HomeKit devices. You can choose to remove them completely, or you can choose to remove them from your home screen or summaries. The first is to completely uninstall and remove accessories from the Apple Home app.

1. Open the Apple Home app.
2. Tap the three-dot circle icon in the top right corner.
3. Tap the top part of the drop-down menu that appears where you get information about your accessories with No response.
4. On the next screen, long-press the gray box of the HomeKit device you want to remove.
5. When the settings screen for that device appears, click Remove Accessory at the bottom.
6. Confirm the deletion by tapping the red Delete button.

That's it, everything is done unless you want to remove a device that is not linked directly to Apple Home, but via a bridge or hub. If so, the nuclear option is to remove that, rather than an individual device itself.

1. Open the Apple Home app.
2. Tap that circle icon with the three dots, at the top right.
3. Choose Home Settings.
4. Tap Home Hubs & Bridges.
5. Choose the desired bridge or hub you want to kill.
6. Select Remove Bridge from Home.
7. Confirm the deletion by tapping the red Delete button.

Removing HomeKit accessories from the Home view

We mentioned that it is also possible to remove unresponsive accessories from your Home view and overviews, rather than removing them completely. You can do this if you plan on resurrecting an accessory in a few months, but may not need it right now. Out of sight out of mind.

1. Open the Apple Home app.
2. Press and hold the accessory you want to exclude from your home screen.
3. Tap Remove from Home Screen.
4. Phew. It's gone.

To add the accessory back to your Home View, open the Apple Home app again and tap the three dots in the circle in the top right corner. From here, tap the No Response section at the top and then tap the accessory you want to add back to your home screen. Once you open the accessory, tap the settings cog in the bottom right corner and enable Add to home view.

HomeKit accessories and devices are not responding

You may have landed on this page because there are devices in your Apple Home app that are apparently dead and unresponsive. If so, the steps above to remove them may restart them if you add them again, but make sure you try to resolve any issues before doing so, and consider removal as a last resort. You can try to fix unresponsive HomeKit accessories yourself by:

• Making sure Bluetooth is enabled in the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad (or in System Settings on your Mac).
• Restart accessories that show signs of unresponsive behavior.
• You may need to remove and reinsert the batteries from your accessory.
• Investigate the manufacturer's own app to see if the accessories that are not responding in the Home app require a firmware update.
• Perform a restart on all third-party bridges (Hue, Aqara and the like) and all HomeKit hubs (including HomePod, HomePod Mini and Apple TV) by unplugging them for 10-20 seconds and then plugging them back into a power source Close.

Also read: How to restart HomePod and HomePod mini