Apple Home(kit) Sharing Issue Resolved! – Now with helpful link!

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Update 04/09/21 – Given that I wrote this article quite a while back, some people may experience that the profile below doesn’t work.  With a tip of the hat, and not a wag of the finger, to commenter “Sam”, the solution is to set your date back to Feb 21, 2021 or earlier and then install the profile.  Thanks for the call out!

Update 12/13/20 – One of the commenters below provided a link to the profile that allows you to remove your Apple HomeKit information, as is the suggstion for the resolution in this post.  That was posted in Dutch and another commenter converted it to English, which I copied here just below.  Please be aware if you use this process it removes all of your HomeKit information, which is what solves the problem.

1. Download & install the profile:
http://appldnld.apple.com/iOSProfiles/HomeResetConfig.mobileconfig

2. Restart your device

3. Go to Settings> home

4. You should now have the option to reset the home app. If not, close the settings, open the home app, and go to settings> home again.

5. You can delete the profile by going to:
Settings> General> Profiles

6. Restart the device again to make sure that the profile is no longer active.

My sincerest thanks to Charles Wreath and BVvdB!

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This gives me hope that Apple can resolve the ongoing Catalina Apple Mail CPU issue.

Here’s a reminder about this problem – it’s pretty long so if all you care about is the solution, skip down to “The Solution”.

Way back in the day, a year or two ago, I decided to start implementing some home automation.  Being an Apple devotee, I decided to start with HomeKit (now called Home).  I already had a bunch of iPads, Apple Phones and Apple TV’s in place, so I ordered some Home compatible light switches and dimmers.  I was able to install all of the switches, control them with my Siri and everything looked peachy.  I was on the cusp of buying additional devices when my daughter decided she didn’t want to share pics anymore nor music.  She was an adult now (> 18) and wanted to control personal info, etc.   My wife also had complained that she didn’t want to automatically see all the odd pics and videos that I took.  So, I enabled Apple Family.

Apple Family allows us to share the same billing account and the same overall iCloud storage but keeps our Photos, Music, and Home settings separate.  That last part is the kicker.  I had taken months to set up all of my devices and automate them.  For her to be able to do the same, Apple Home featured an invite function that allowed me to invite my family as people who could access my automation devices.  Sounds pretty straightforward.

However, when I went to invite her, she would receive the invitation but could not accept it.  She would press “Accept” and it would spin for a while, some odd things would happen, she’d receive an error message that said “Cannot Accept Request” and then neither of us had access to our devices anymore.  My image had her email address listed, and I was the guest in my home suddenly.  Insert joke about marriage here.

This required me to reset my Home setup (delete my home, but the mortgage remained).  It caused great pain because it’s not trivial to re-setup the devices I had.  I tried sharing again with no luck.

I called Apple and opened a case and they had me try a few things, but life got busy and I let the case close.  In December of last year, I decided to give it another shot so I opened a new case and was assigned a plucky Apple engineer named “Nikki”.  She collected information from my phone, logs, snapshots of the error messages, etc.   It took hours of working together for weeks.  We uploaded the captured information so that Apple senior engineers could take a look.  With each update to iOS, she would contact me and have me try again, having been assured by engineers that the latest release had the fix.  Nopes.  It got to the point where I could replicate this problem without even having any devices setup.   She had me log out of all of my devices (every Apple TV, phone, iPad, etc.) and try again.  Painful and time-consuming, Nothing.  She had me make sure Multi-Factor-Authentication was on.  No change.  The last time I spoke to her before this time, I suggested that maybe they need to write a script that just blows every last remnant of Apple Home data off of my shared accounts.

Last week she contacted me with a profile that, when installed and enabled on my iPhone would introduce a “Reset” button on my iPhone under Apple Home settings.  It would, indeed, delete every piece of Home information from my account.  I tried this, attempted a share – and IT WORKED.  My daughter was able to be a guest in my home while I retained ownership. Add another commentary about kids living in your home.

Side Note: Nikki, Apple Engineer, if you read this, I hope you’re doing well.  And thank you.

The Solution

Before you attempt to share your home with a Family Member, first make sure:

• Both devices are on the latest release of iOS
• Both devices have multi-factor authentication on (MFA) – that’s where when you log into your Apple account you have to approve access from another device and enter a code.  Convenient!

If you’ve done this and you receive the same errors that I did, open a case with Apple and tell them you are having the same problems as my case (#101016140603) and need the profile installed where you can reset your Apple Home information.

Note: this will delete every piece of information related to your Apple Home (Kit) devices.  You’ll have to start over after this, re-select your Apple TV (or iPad) as your Home hub and redefine all of your switches).

Please let me know if you attempt this.  If I can help or answer any questions, post a comment below and I’ll respond.

I just exchanged emails with Heather about my Catalina Mail CPU problem.  No word back, but there’s hope now.