Home Kit Issue

Verify you’ve followed the steps to accept the invite:

Accept an invitation to control a home

When someone invites you to control their home, you get a notification in the Home app on your iOS device or Mac. Follow the steps below to accept the invitation.

On your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

1. Open the Home app and tap .
2. Tap Home Settings.
3. Tap Accept, then tap Done.

After you accept the invite, tap , then tap the name of the Home to control it.

On your Mac

1. Open the Home app and click  in the toolbar.
2. Click 1 Invitation.
3. Click Accept, then click Done.

After you accept the invite, click  in the toolbar, then click the name of the home to control it.

Share control of your home

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208709

Aside from that you could try restarting the device you’re trying to accept from and reset network settings to eliminate any internet issues going on.

And ...see if there are interruptions in service in your country or region on the the Apple System Status page

Make sure you both have two-factor authentication enabled for your iCloud accounts. Homekit requires this for security.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205075

I guess you are affected by the HomeKit spinning wheel bug. Apple has had this problem for over three years now but they still haven't fixed it. There seem to be some variations of it.

The one I have is:

I have an Apple ID (created already ten years ago or so). Before family sharing was introduced we both used my Apple ID. Two years ago she created her home and we switched it on her MacBook.

So now the problem is everytime I try to invite her to my home (or she tries to invite me to hers), it stucks (endless spinning wheel). The next thing that happens is that the inviting person is degraded on her own home to status "guest". When you enter the account in them Home app, you see that the Apple ID adress changes to the other one (my wife suddenly gets my Apple ID, vice versa).

Unfortunately Apple Support can't help, they just give you the standard advices which won't help. I also tried some things (delete some keys in the keychain, etc...) but haven't solved it yet... Unfortunately the Invitation process is not very well documented, so there is no chance for me to track the bug and give more detailed infos to Apple.

Very sad as I think there are lots of couples who are affected by this bug.

Are you operating two Home Hubs and are these in separate locations (not on same network)? I have one hub that I created and successfully invited my family to join. If, somehow, you have managed to create two hubs for the one location/home network that may confuse things.

The Home Hub seems to reside as a cloud on the home network, hosted by a Homepod or Apple TV (or iPad that is always connected). The Home app on your iOS device or Mac is used to issue commands to Homekit devices via the hub but does not host the hub. So deleting one of the hubs may help (not sure how could be done as there doesn't seem to be advice on this on the Apple Support pages - maybe delete both hubs and start again)

If you do have hubs at separate locations then there is one problem that I have encountered on a different Apple service. You have quite an old AppleID. - my AppleID has been forced to change over the years from XX to XX@mac.com to XX@.me.com to XX@icloud. Sometimes I have to use old IDs to access/update old apps and iTunes purchases or to use email. The other IDs are treated as aliases most of the time, but sometimes not. I wonder if this type of issue could be affecting your Homekit system?

First of all thank you very much for helping to narrow the scope of the failure.

Does this mean everytime you were enforced you created a whole new Apple ID (not an alias)?

My Problem is I don't want to copy over all my photos, data and so on and I see the problem that there will always be issues with the Apps bought.

For myself I have an Apple TV and a HomePod as two hubs of the same home (one active, one in Standby). But even as I took them both out (by factory reset) the problem still occurred. Strange thing about it is that after the invite my home shows my name and my wife's Apple-ID at the persons preferences on the Home-App.

So I guess there also must be something wrong especially with "husband/wife-IDs". I might think that there is any kind of exchanged Identity-Token/certificate which got accidentally shared between the two accounts (either via family sharing or via a device on which both were logged in).

But thanks very much for you effort and your ideas to identify the root(s) of the problems.

As my AppleID has changed my iCloud functions have, fortunately, followed me (contacts, calendar, mail & itunes). But the app store has been a problem and also signing in to these discussions. There is no logic to it, which is why I mentioned it above.

Regarding the Homekit hub, my point was that it seems to be tied to your home network rather than a single device, like a Homepod. Having several devices as "hubs" should not result in multiple Homekit hubs on your network - they simply share the same Homekit data (as far as I can work out)