If you’re like most people, you probably have a few HomeKit devices scattered around your home. But if you want to remove them from your Apple HomeKit home, it can be a bit of a challenge. Here’s how to do it. First, open the Home app on your iPhone or iPad and tap on the “Home” button in the top-left corner. This will open up your home’s overview screen. Next, tap on the “Devices” tab at the top of the screen. This will show you a list of all of your HomeKit devices. To remove a device from your home, first find it in the list and then tap on its name. This will open up its overview screen. On this screen, you’ll see two options: “Remove from Home” and “Keep in Home.” If you want to remove the device from your home, tap on “Remove from Home.” This will take you to a confirmation screen where you can confirm that you want to remove the device from your home. Once you’ve confirmed that, the device will be removed from your home and won’t be able to interact with other devices in your home anymore. If you want to keep the device in your home but disable its ability to interact with other devices in your home, tap on “Keep in Home.” This will take you to a confirmation screen where you can disable or enable certain features for this particular device within your home’s settings. Once you’ve confirmed that, the device will stay in your home but its ability to interact with other devices in your home will be disabled. ..
Whether you no longer have the HomeKit accessory in question or simply need to remove a phantom entry in your HomeKit home, it’s simple to do so—if you know where to look. Let’s remove a HomeKit device now and guide you through the process.
In our case, we were having an issue with our Schlage Sense smart lock and decided to simply factory reset it before adding it back to our HomeKit home. After doing so successfully, we realized that we hadn’t removed the old entry from HomeKit, and now we had two smart locks installed—one that worked great and one that HomeKit kept complaining about. While you may find yourself in the same situation, you may also simply want to remove a device altogether because you no longer use it, got rid of it, or any number of reasons.
To do so, open up the Home app on any iOS device that belongs to the HomeKit administrator (the HomeKit administrator is the person whose iCloud account was used to setup the HomeKit system). Select the entry in the bottom navigation bar for “Rooms”.
The device we want to remove is actually right on our main screen under the “Favorite Accessories” category, but it won’t be front and center for everyone so we’ll drill one layer deeper in the menu. Within the “Rooms” menu, swipe left or right until you locate the room where the device is. If you never assigned the device to a room it will be, as our smart lock is, located in the “Default Room” panel.
Press and hold the entry for the device you wish to remove from your HomeKit home. Doing so will pull up a more detailed entry for the device.
There you’ll find additional information about the given device such as “Firmware update needed”, the general status of the device (on, off), and, of course, if you’re trying to remove an erroneous or missing entry like we are, you’ll see “No Response” because the accessory in question doesn’t exist.
Click on the “Details” button at the bottom to drill down one more layer in the details view.
Scroll down to the bottom of the detailed view and select “Remove Accessory”.
Confirm you wish to remove it by tapping “Remove” in the pop-up dialog.
RELATED: How to Reset Your HomeKit Devices and Configuration
That’s it! After digging down (perhaps a layer or two farther than you’d expect), we’ve successfully removed a HomeKit item. If your HomeKit woes run a bit deeper than simply removing a single item and you need to either reset one or more items (or wipe your entire HomeKit configuration to start fresh), do take a moment to check out our detailed tutorial on the matter.
