This is by the way kind of how remote access with apple home works.

The Apple TV serves as a local gateway relaying all the commands to your local IoT devices.

On a side note, tailscale is lovely. I have nothing but good things to say about them.

Yup, either a HomePod, Apple TV, or iPad left at home can act as a HomeKit hub.

Just an FYI, but iPads can no longer be used as a HomeKit hub as of last year: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213481

(Yes, you can technically use an iPad as a hub if you are on the old Home architecture)

Good change, then! It wasn’t a great experience for most people. iPads are rarely static home fixtures now, and they were the only ones capable of dying.

Yeah, that was always a weird choice. The one time I went on holiday without first checking to see which device was acting as my primary home hub it turned out to be my iPad, which I'd taken with me, and all my security cameras were "unavailable" for the week. I'm sure the system is supposed to just switch to a different primary hub in that situation (I have about 15 candidates), but it didn't.

> This is by the way kind of how remote access with apple home works.

Apple killed Back to My Mac, which sounded a lot like Tailscale exit nodes: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6281