Inconsistent HomeKit on Apple Watch with Home Assistant

Question

d0xtr Author

Level 1

4 points

Inconsistent HomeKit on Apple Watch with Home Assistant

Title: Inconsistent HomeKit entities on Apple Watch (watchOS 26.5)

I’m seeing inconsistent behavior when controlling my Home Assistant entities from my Apple Watch.

Steps to reproduce:

Open the Home app on the Apple Watch, or Use Siri on the Apple Watch to control a HomeKit entity.

Expected behavior:

The entity state changes immediately.

Actual behavior:

The entity often remains in one of the following states:

No Response
Waiting…
Request Sent

Eventually the command may succeed, or it may fail entirely.

Observations:

I don’t own any native HomeKit accessories, an Apple TV, or a HomePod. I’m using the Home Assistant HomeKit Bridge integration.
When I manually force the Apple Watch to stay connected to Wi-Fi, HomeKit sometimes starts working, but not consistently.
I don’t experience this issue on my iPhone or Mac, likely because they are connected to Wi-Fi most of the time.
The behavior on watchOS is inconsistent. Sometimes Control Center shows Home controls correctly, while other times it reports that no Home Hub is available. On macOS I also see “No Home Hub,” yet Home control still works. On the Apple Watch, however, commands frequently fail when the Home Hub message appears.

I’m not sure whether this is an expected limitation or a bug in watchOS/HomeKit, but the current behavior feels very inconsistent. Has anyone else using the Home Assistant HomeKit Bridge experienced the same issue?

Apple Watch Ultra 3, watchOS 26

Posted on Jul 6, 2026 4:20 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

WheelieNick

Level 9

50,667 points

Aug 12, 2026 2:37 PM in response to d0xtr

Try this

Use the Native Companion App: Instead of routing via HomeKit, configure actions/buttons directly through the Home Assistant Companion App settings on your iPhone for the Apple Watch, or use watch complications.

Add a Resident Hub: Setting up an Apple TV or HomePod stabilizes local accessory state caching for watchOS.

Isolate Problematic Entities: Check your Home Assistant configuration.yaml under the HomeKit integration and use exclude_entities to trim down large numbers of entities that might choke the watch's slow synchronization sync.

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Answer 2

d0xtr Author

Level 1

4 points

Aug 12, 2026 4:02 PM in response to WheelieNick

Thanks for taking time looking into my query. I am not willing to invest in apple tv or HomePod. In addition, that should work OOTB, I have only 2 lights entity which I control all the rest are exclude. I want to use apple native control so it will be easier to control via Siri. Considering that apple watch is not always connected to wifi I believe that the issue.

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