Apple Home Invites Not Being Received

You will need to wait for the Home Architecture feature to resume via a future software update. It was released but paused. Some might have installed it while other family members missed out. This is causing some users not to be able to control home or complete the invites. We don’t know when Apple will resume this. See: Upgrade to the new Home architecture - Apple Support

It’s not available to upgrade, it still says ”:We temporarily removed the option to upgrade to the new Home architecture. The option to upgrade will return soon. If you already upgraded, you are unaffected by this change”

Upgrade to the new Home architecture - Apple Support

Only some people upgraded while it was available, or only some of their devices installed it.

• I spent three hours with an Apple advisor today trying to determine why I cannot receive an invitation from wife Home app. The app on her phone says invite is pending, but my phone receives nothing that we (me and advisor) can find. We have one Home Pod Mini, two iphones and two ipads that we are working with. This was third or fourth call to Apple with no actual solution. All devices are running IOS 16.3 and are on the same network. While my wife’s phone and ipad appear to showing connectivity properly right now it does not stay that way. Why can’t Apple address this issue?

After the Home update that required all devices to be updated, our other phone kept saying that all devices needed to be updated even though this had been done. It was in a strange state because the phone saw the home but could not access it, and so re-inviting had no effect.

Not wanting to do the nuclear option mentioned elsewhere in the thread of wiping out the profiles and starting over, I tried a modification of the steps and it worked.

1. Create an open invite to the 2nd device in the Home Settings. Wait about a minute.
2. On the 2nd device, delete the Home App from the phone completely. Then reinstall it.
3. Restart the 2nd device.
4. Open the Home app on the 2nd device. You will probably still see the unresponsive home.
5. On the primary device, cancel the open invite. After a few seconds, send a new one. It may take a few minutes but the unresponsive home should disappear on the 2nd device and a default home might get created. The invite should trigger within a few minutes.
6. If the home does not appear within a few minutes, cancel and resend the invite again. After a few minutes it should appear on the 2nd device correctly with all settings intact.
7. Once this is done you can delete the default home if you wish by switching to it and using the Home Settings.

I'm not sure which of these did the trick but the key is to somehow get rid of the unresponsive home, which seems to prevent new invites from working.

The above screen Invitation to “Home” is something many of us have never seen our phones.

All our IT consumer products are from Apple where possible (iPhones, iPads, appleTVs, Airpods, ...), so using HomeKit was my default choice for "ultra" integration. But boy oh boy what a disappointment!

I posted here some time ago that I was fed up with all the bugs in Homekit and was going to build the frontent myself in Node-Red. This was when I was trying to resolve other HomeKit issues by removing the Homekit config and reconfigured everything on a new appleTV 4K with Ethernet. But, as everybody here already knows, it is not possible anymore to invite guests. So my wife was locked out and she had to call me to open the gate as we use HomeKit to trigger a switch to open our gate.

All "solutions" provided did not work. Only to let frustration grow.

What apple tends to forget is that HomeKit is kind of a mission critical application regarding a home. Switches for my heating, my gate, and other important stuff was managed thru Homekit.

As the issue was urgent I worked thru the weekend to create a dashboard using Node-Red. A lot of work but I really like the end result. The iPad in my living room now looks like this:

When somebody rings at the gate, a picture pops-up for 2 minutes: a ton of features not possible with Homekit.

But most important: finally a stable solution! No delays, no connection issues (what a relief).

I also created a dashboard for our iPhones

I use the RemoteRED application: that application broadcasts the Node-Red dashboard webpage thru a secure tunnel to an iPhone app. So basically, my Node-Red webpage becomes an app:

Automatically opening our gate is now done thru Shortcuts, where the RemoteRED application is used to send a command to Node-Red:

The result is full control of my home and automations without any HomeKit.

My main message is: when you rely on an application or framework that does not work, even if it is from a giant like Apple. Just search for alternatives that do work :-)

I am getting this to work for my wife new iPad and newest software update 16.3.1

After resetting the Home following the steps already mentioned above, i am getting the invitation with unknown sender as showed in the attached screenshot.

Please Apple, we need a fix to this issue…

BTW, I am receiving invitation on OLD iPad Air with iOS 12.5.7.

Using 16.3.1 and Home not working Home would not update HomePods and Invite not working, I used above from Marco202, worked for me just now. Had to do both iPhones. Thanks Marco!

I have this problem too. All devices are running on 17.4 and my child's invitation is still not received. Has anyone else had this issue with updated IOS?

No, I already tried that a week ago and it did not work. I have tried everything reasonable that I have found on the Apple support communities, the subreddits r/HomePod and r/HomeKit, and still invitations do not work.

Bad news... after some time (30 min++), both my wife and daughter home app is not working again. The shared home disappeared (again), and both cannot receive invitation (from me and other people). And both cannot send invitation from the empty home they have.

I've really no clue...

I give up.

My whole house is using Homekit as a front-end for automations.

The whole system is unstable for two years now and every iOS update I keep my fingers crossed and hope that bugs are fixed... but unfortunately in vain.

An example: I have an automation that when me or my wife arrive home, the gate needs to open. In literally 90% of the cases Homekit is unresponsive and nothing happens. I need to close the whole app and after a restart and after 1-2min Homekit is able to reconnect. Pretty frustrating.

The amount of time I have spent with reviewing my network, buying a different router, etc... the problem is that all my other services work 100% of the time on any type of router, within my network and also from outside my network.

This one now is the drop.. in the never ending struggle to make HomeKit a workable system I moved it from an always plugged in iPad pro to my apple TV. Hoping this could be the magic solution... only to encounter that my wife is now not able to use HomeKit.

I am using Node-Red as the main component in my house (bridged to HomeKit), and I have started to build a GUI using the Node-Red dashboard. Remote access to the dashboard is possible using the "Remote-Red" app.

Opening the gate will be done using IFTTT or Google Home.

Rather than spend my time on trying to fix HomeKit, I will put my energy in building a beautiful tailor made GUI.

I wish you all the best of luck with HomeKit, but after a long struggle I need to say farewell :-)

try the 3rd way(Reset HomeKit via Mobile Config), i solved this problem:https://www.droidwin.com/apple-homekit-invite-not-working-on-ios-16-2-fixed/

first i sent the invite to my wife.

then i installed the profile on my wife’s iPhone (iOS 16.3), and reset homekit.

i reopened the “home” app, the invite showed .

Other people here was able to solve the issue with the HomeKitReset.mobileconfig while for some that didn't work.

In my case, That didn't work for me on 16.x - while it finally worked if on a 15.7.x device (and a lot of other useless attempts...).

That was exaclty my situation.

I solved it by resetting the daughters' and wife's Home profile using the mobileconfig setup on a device still on 15.7.x. None of them were able to receive (and send) any invitation from any other Homes (including mine).

Check few posts above for the details.