HA bridge HomeKit does not working when sharing with family members

Hi All,
I recently set up the integration for IOS homekit. It is working exceptionally smooth and responsive, while the native HA app has some glitches with background refresh. Anyway, when I try to share it with other family members (wife, kids) they cannot control the devices/entities, because they are shown with a “No response” label.
Any idea how to fix this?

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Hello - I have the same issue.
Did you find out a solution @julkohome ?

Cheers.

Hi Tony,
Unfortunately not. I was thinking of adding the accessories manually of the family member’s phones, witch makes no sense but I am thing of giving it a try.

Same issue here, can’t share with family. Any solution ?

Also having this issue but can’t find any solution.

Logs are showing

('xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx', xxxxx): Client `redacted` attempted pair verify without being paired to HASS Homekit Bridge first.

Same issue here, ERROR (MainThread) [pyhap.hap_handler] ([ip and port]): Client [uuid] attempted pair verify without being paired to HASS Bridge first
I have done some Google searches but have not found any useful solutions.

Any solution on this?
I experience the same. Working fine on one iPhone but getting not responding on the Family iPhones.

A friend of mine told me that it might work when using AppleTV or Homepod as a hub instead of iPad. Also, when making the first configuration you cat try logout and powering off/on the hub/ha and iPhone.
Sometimes it’s working, sometimes not. I haven’t tried it yet.

Seeing the exact same issue here, the client IP goes back to a family members phone IP.

We’re not using any homepod/appletv/ipad for remote access.

Did anyone manage to get to the bottom of this issue?
Thanks in advance!

Suddenly my logs are filled with these messages and no clue what is going on.

Same issue. Any solution?

Seeing a similar thing in that my invited family members do not see any accessories after they accept the invite to the home. Is there a way to bring up the pairing QR code again? Has anyone tried running multiple HomeKit bridges (with different ports) to see if that helps?

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Try restarting all devices such as AppleTV, IPADs, etc. and reconnect the again.

Hi,
I’ve found a workaround but it’s time-consuming (especially if you have a lot of devices). If you configure in HA the Homekit Service as Accessory and NOT as Bridge the device will be shared with family members. The problem is that you have to configure 1 service for each entity and add them one by one to HomeKit.

I can see all the devices on the shared account.

Hi,

So I found a better workaround - still not a solution though. The problem is that the Homekit account the Home has been shared TO does not get a valid pairing to the bridge, but it can get have a pairing to an accessory. So what I did was

  • create a new Homekit integration entry, configure it as an ‘accessory’, not a bridge and add a single entity to it
  • add it to a home on an Apple device and verify that it is controllable from both the main apple account and the secondary one
  • on the homeassistant server under /homeassistant/.storage there should be files named homekit.*.state where the pairings are stored.
  • copy the pairings from the newly created integration (accessory) to the previous (bridge) one. I also increase the config_version key although I am not sure it was necessary
  • reload the integration

The json keys that need to be copied are paired_clients, client_properties and client_uuid_to_bytes - make sure to overwrite the keys in the target file, not add new ones, and not to overwrite any other keys. Obviously make a backup of the file before editing.

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This certainly suggests a bug with bridge pairing. Are we able to get some concrete data on how to reproduce this issue? What is the impact? I believe that I am facing this issue too.

Just wanted to say thanks to @slawekb for typing up this solution. Had exactly this problem and the fix works well. Definitely seems like a bug that’s crept in with more recent versions of the Homekit bridge addon.

I did not strike this issue recently. There has been a number of improvements to HomeKit in the past few months. It may be worthwhile removing your HomeKit Bridge from HA and Home app then recreating and adding it back again. Notably, all my Alarm and Alarm-type sensors are working with notifications again.