HomeKit HomeKit invitation issues

[HiVolt]

A family member has recently upgraded from an iPhone XR to an iPhone 17. I had them added in HomeKit so they could use the garage door opener.

However, since their phone upgrade, their new iPhone 17 will not receive the invitation, it just forever says "invitation pending".

I thought it would be pretty simple, remove the home from the Home app on the XR, send an invitation to the same number/Apple ID of the family member and it would not work. The old XR keeps getting the invitation, even though it's only on Wifi since phone # was switched to the eSIM only iPhone 17.

I though OK, lets just sign out of iCloud on the XR. Yeah, that stopped the invitations going to the XR, but still do not appear on the 17.

Everything works fine on the 17, including iMessage, Facetime, all the iCloud stuff. Just will not receive the Homekit invitation.

All devices involved run iOS 26.1 and the homepod hubs are on 26.1 as well. They work fine on their own and the home is accessible from outside the home so I assume everything works ok with that, no warning messages in the Home app.

Any solutions?

 

[HiVolt]

Here's an update, I managed to figure it out purely by accident. We updated all the devices to iOS 26.2, and tried the invite again, with no notification. I started fiddling within the iPhone 17's Home app, and buried under a menu somewhere i dont remember, was a notification that an "unknown sender" has sent an invitation.

That turned out to be my invitations, and the reason that I was listed as unknown, was because the iPhone 17's contact entry for me did not have my icloud email address, it only had my phone number and a gmail address.

I don't use my iCloud emails for regular correspondence with anyone, so i don't give it out. But after adding my iCloud address to my contact card on the iPhone 17, the invitation was received immediately.

It would be nice if there was some way for the Home app to verify this, like some kind of bounceback message that the person on the other end might not see the invitation because of this, or it may be listed as unknown sender.

I still dont know why this is required anyway, as I was able to iMessage with that family member's iPhone 17 no problem.