Apple, give me a way to do this one thing with all of my devices
A few days ago, Apple released version 16.3.1 of the HomePod software. I sat at my desk at work, and in the Home app on my iPad I remotely commanded my three HomePod minis to download and install this update. But even though that same Home app lets me see my Apple TV and make some minor setting changes to it, I can’t remotely update its software the way I can my HomePod minis. Why not? For that matter, why can’t I remotely update my kids’ iPads, or my wife’s iPhone, or her MacBook Air?
I don’t know why I haven’t given this much thought before now. After all, my job is centered around remotely administering Apple devices in an enterprise IT setting. There are several companies making great tools for doing this at very large scale. Apple even recently released their Apple Business Essentials product which lets small businesses manage their Apple devices. I want something like this for my home devices. As it currently stands, any time new Apple OS updates come out, I have to sit down and manually update all of my household Apple devices.
Some of the pieces of this potential service are already there. In addition to what you can do in the Home app, you can use Family Sharing to share an Apple One services subscription across up to six people in your family. You can use Screen Time to manage how much your kids are allowed to use their devices per day, including per-category app limits. Find My lets you find all of your household Apple devices. And Apple already built the framework that enterprise management suites use to send remote commands to restart or update an Apple device.
I think the Home app would be a good place to house this new service I’m advocating for. Let me see every Apple device owned by every member of my family, and let me remotely restart and update devices. You could have an option to download the latest OS release and then prompt your family members to start the update. You could set them to run their updates overnight. You could even force them to download, install, and restart the devices immediately if need be.
It wouldn’t take much to add this functionality to the Home app. Maybe think about it, Apple?