Sharing homekit settings - do you need a hub?

[SidBoggle]

Hi, I have just set up a few Hue lights around the house and eveything is working brilliantly with homekit and the new ios 10 Home app/control center. I tried to invite my wife to share the setup and her home app/control center all gets updated with the lights but every light says "no response" underneath.

I tried lots of different things and then wondered if you need a hub for sharing your homekit setup. So I set up my ipad as a hub and everything now works! So my question is do you actually need a hub set up to share your setup? In all the apple guides I could not see this mentioned anywhere. It is not ideal as I do not have an Apple TV and this hub setup will only work when i have the ipad sitting at home.

Has anyone else successfully shared their setup without a hub? Thanks.

 

[ksaipas]

I am having the same problem with the only difference being that I have not setup my iPad as a hub. As such my wife's home app lists all hue bulbs as unresponsive.

 

[matthijst]

Same issue, but with ATV4 as a hub.

 

[SidBoggle]

I'm glad it is not just me. You might want to try switching your iPad to a hub in Settings->Home (iOS 10 only I believe) and see if that also fixes your issue. I'm still confused if this whole thing is supposed to work like this - I'd like to know a bit more about what happens behind the scenes when you share your HomeKit setup.

 

[SidBoggle]

Same issue, but with ATV4 as a hub.

So that blows the whole hub solution out of the water...... it's a bit of a black box this whole HomeKit malarkey.

 

[matthijst]

Hue tweeted that their app needs an update.
Should be out soon.

 

[SidBoggle]

Hue tweeted that their app needs an update.
Should be out soon.

Thanks. That's interesting - did they provide a link or any more info? Still I will cope with my iPad hub setup until they roll that out and we will see if it helps us.

 

[matthijst]

Thanks. That's interesting - did they provide a link or any more info? Still I will cope with my iPad hub setup until they roll that out and we will see if it helps us.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Hue/comments/52n7lv/hue_home_and_two_iphones/?st=IT7LW7N3&sh=856f321c

 

[GreyOS]

When I experimented with it during the beta using an unofficial bridge for LIFX bulbs, I did not need a hub to share. Can't speak for how it works now though

 

[SidBoggle]

Thanks for the input everyone. Hue released an update for the software and the bridge today and sharing now works without the bridge.

 

[GreyOS]

Thanks for the input everyone. Hue released an update for the software and the bridge today and sharing now works without the bridge.

just to clarify for my own understanding, do you mean an update to their bridge so it works without a hub? or do you not need their bridge any more?

 

[SidBoggle]

just to clarify for my own understanding, do you mean an update to their bridge so it works without a hub?

Yes there is a firmware update to the hue bridge. I have now disabled my HomeKit hub on my iPad and the sharing still works okay.