I thought I’d post this, in case anyone else was having this problem…
TL;DR: If your Home invitations are not being received by people, it’s probably because your home and their account are using different versions of the HomeKit architecture. If they’re already on the new architecture, you’ll have to delete all homes in your account and then re-add them under the new architecture.
The problem: my partner and I just moved into a new house. After setting up the house with a bunch of HomeKit devices, I sent her an invitation to the house, which was never received. Repeated attempts, OS updates, and sending between different platforms yielded no results.
After a few calls with Apple, I finally got someone who understood the problem. In iOS 16.2, Apple released their “new HomeKit architecture.” In my case, I still had my old house in HomeKit, which was on the “old” architecture. So, when I added the new house, it was also added using the old architecture. After populating it with all of my devices, I deleted the old house and sent an invitation to my partner for the new house.
This is where the problems began.
When I deleted the old house, of which she was a member, it deleted the sole house in her HomeKit configuration, so her iCloud account was automatically updated to the new architecture. My account, however, was not, because I had the new house which was still using the old architecture. Unfortunately, an invitation sent from a device on the old architecture, to one on the new architecture is simply lost.
The key clue to all of this could be found on my iPhone, going to Home → Home Settings → Software Update (the one in the Home app; not the one in the Settings app). If my home had been updated to the new architecture, it would have reported, “This home and all accessories are up to date.” Instead, it said, “All accessories are up to date.” The difference is subtle, and arguably unclear, but the long and short of it is that the latter message indicated that I was still on the old architecture.
The fix was to delete the home (and any others) from my Home app. Upon creating the new home, the first device that I added was an Apple TV and a pair of HomePods, which would serve as the hubs for the newly-created home. After doing that, I went back to the Software Update page, and it reported that “This home and all accessories are up to date.” That was the indication that I needed, to continue to re-add all of my devices to the home, and send my partner an invitation, which she did receive.
For those of you with lots of devices in your home (I have over 50, including my HomeBridge devices), it can be cumbersome to re-add all of the devices, but the alternative was to wait for Apple to come up with a fix, which didn’t seem likely in the near future.
In any case, I hope this helps someone out there who was having this problem.
#macos #ios #ipados #home #homekit #newarchitecture
