HomeKit invites not working after HomeKit architecture upgrade

If your wife is on 16.4 she’s supposed to be able to access it. You might have an OS mismatch going on. It happened on mine with one HomePod. I noted in the HomePod setting it was on 16.4 but in iCloud settings it remained on 16.3.2. I had to reset the HomePod and set it up again. Following this it showed it was back on 16.4. I can’t say that's the cause. it’s just something you might want to take a look at. On your iPhone in settings - your name - scroll down to the HomePod and tap it it see its details to see if it says 16.4.

Had to do the same rebuild everything on my wife’s account and invite my self. All on 16.4+.

Also had to stop apple Music family sharing and start it with here account and inviting myself.

this is just no good Apple. Start testing your updates with HomeKit that has more than a few products.

Whoever suffers with this: check if your iCloud account is on blocked list for FaceTime on your invitee’s device. I tried ALL the possible fixes(including nuking everything) but I never seen this in the suggestions. In our case this was it (now it is also mentioned in the official support article at Apple)

If you have a VPN on the device that is having trouble, try turning it off on any device that isn't working or in your router if you have that enabled. This solved a number of issues for me after moving to the new architecture.

Hello,

resetting the data on the target iPhone according to the article below helped me. After the reset, I recommend waiting 10 minutes before sending the invitation again. Now I have another problem - I have two Homes and the invitation from the second one has not yet arrived on iPhone at all.

https://timothyduong.me/tech/2021/6/16/resetting-your-apple-homekit-in-icloud-homekit-pending-invitation-issue

Me too - I have two homes set up - one for work and one for home. I sent an invite to someone at work, while she was there, and it worked fine. Two hours later I went home, and needed to invite a house guest. I did exactly the same thing I did with the person at work - just sent an invite - and at home it didn’t work. Same as the others here; the invite appeared on her device as a notification, then promptly disappeared and I couldn’t find the invite anywhere. I had to do it several times so that I could catch the notification as soon as it popped up.

It said that I needed to upgrade to the new architecture before she could be invited. I went back to my phone to upgrade and it said that I couldn’t because it would screw up the people sharing my work hub. As I said, it was only 2 hours earlier that I successfully added a person to my work home - no request for an update.

There is one difference between the two. The person at work had an Apple email address as their appleID, while the person at home has a Yahoo.com email address as their appleID. I could possibly see something like that screwing up something like this.

BTW - I rarely invited people to share (although I have needed to at work) because of the requirement that they have an iCloud account. I always found that frustrating. Not everyone has one, and I’m not going to make someone create an iCloud account just so they can control my lights the few times that they need to.

Can you have an appleID without having an iCloud account? Maybe that’s it…. I highly doubt that the person at home has one; she wouldn’t set it up if it wasn’t automatic with her Apple ID.

Just found the answer to that - no, you have to set up an iCloud account - it is not automatic with your Apple ID. I’m pretty sure the person at work has an iCloud account, and my house guest does not.

That may explain the difference with inviting the two. I’d be curious to see if anyone else here with the problem saw the same - did the people being invited have an iCloud account or just an Apple ID?

With the new update to Apple Home on iOS, my wife was today kicked out of our shared Home, and Apple now says I need to buy a home hub for us to be able to share our Home again. I’m only using Home to be able to control our lights from the control centre. This no longer works for us. Have anyone else noticed this?

This seems like a desperate move from Apple to make people buy their overpriced Homepods.

Do you know what doesn’t do this Alexa… what a mistake switching over. In 2023 I have to give up permissions and send invites for people to turn off lights and control timers in my kitchen? Get with the program Apple.

Glad you got it working, thanks for letting us know.

have the same issue, is rebuilding the only way to fix it? I really don't want to build it again, too many devices and automations.