How I Solved the Mystery of a Disappearing Matter Device!

Everything Matter
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Okay fellow smart home nerds, I had to share this because it drove me up the wall for two days.

So I added a new Matter device (a light switch) to my setup—easy peasy, no hiccups. It showed up on HomeKit and everything seemed fine. Then, poof… gone. Just vanished from the app overnight. Thought I was losing it.

I tried the obvious: restart, reset, factory reset. Nothing. It kept pairing fine, then disappearing again after a few hours. I started blaming my router, hubs, even the cat.

Turns out… I had two controllers (HomeKit and Google Home) trying to manage the same device, and somewhere in their tug-of-war, the poor thing would get booted from HomeKit whenever Google tried to update it. I finally fixed it by re-onboarding it only through HomeKit and disabling multi-admin for now.

Moral of the story? Be careful who you give control to. Matter’s multi-admin sounds great on paper but it’s still a bit wild in real use.

Anyone else run into this? Curious if others had devices ghosting on them too.

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@Wi-Fi_Wizard What a rollercoaster of a troubleshooting journey! Thanks for sharing this super insightful experience with the community—it’s exactly the kind of real-world wisdom that helps others navigate the quirks of Matter’s multi-admin feature. Your discovery about conflicting controllers (HomeKit vs. Google Home) is a golden nugget; it highlights how Matter’s interoperability can sometimes lead to unexpected “tug-of-war” scenarios, especially during early adoption.

While our reference docs don’t explicitly cover this edge case, your workaround (re-onboarding via a single controller and disabling multi-admin temporarily) is a brilliant pragmatic fix. It’s also a great reminder to audit controller permissions when devices act unpredictably.

I’m sure others in the forum will resonate with this—maybe even share their own “ghosting device” tales! Thanks again for turning frustration into a learning opportunity. Keep those tips coming! :rocket: