Multiple homes/bridges in one physical location not possible

I have several homes in Home app for geofencing our kids phones with virtual devices & Home app location automations. This was working fine until I had to upgrade Home app to new architecture…

However, when I upgraded one of my kids phone he couldn't access his Home no more for some reason. Re-invite didn't succeed before I'd upgrade Home architecture which I did and it went (almost) without an issues.

But after upgrading Home architecture kids homes are nagging about Home having no hubs and accessing home remotely won't work. So this affects also automations and location data and therefore geofencing stopped functioning.

Does this mean that there is no possibility to have separate Homes for kids with virtual devices for location tracking (home or not)? Could we have "virtual home hub" etc so that separate Homes could still be used? Or is there some other solution for this? I’d prefer no separate app installed to phones if possible.

We have 100+ devices in our home and kids are under 10 years so opening the "main home" is not an option for few more years - those curious little devils are tempted with all the buttons we have…

I posted issue about this to GitHub as well, feel free to close it if you think this was waste of your time

Hi

If I am following along correctly this seems to be a Home ecosystem question / problem ?

It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with this Indigo plugin - HomeKitLink Siri. So not sure I can help particularly, and may be better posted elsewhere.

Given the specific requirements probably need to ask in a Home / Apple forum somewhere.

But seems like you have created multiple Home app Homes for children access and without a Home hub (now an apple requirement for remote access) for each Home you can’t access remotely. Yes that would be expected. You could have one old cheap appleTV somewhere as a Hub for a Children Home (and combine them all), alternatively you may need some other solution from some where else (as you mention others iOS apps etc) to achieve what you want.

Having separate ‘virtual’ homes for family members wouldn’t be recommend by apple I wouldn’t think.

Glenn


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Yes, definitely more Apple issue than plugins but I’m getting there!

I thought about setting up 4 more apple tv’s for each family member which seemed to be overkill solution. But having just one more installed could be something I could live with.

But what about devices (lights, motion sensors etc) I’ve already published to main home, I thought device can only be published to one home? I bumped into this when started using plugin and I had this multi-Home setup back then already. Does plugin have a workaround/solution to that?

Setting up new Apple TV already raising questions like how I should separate it from other Apple TVs? Install it with different Apple ID or to separate network (WiFi or VLAN) or some other way? Have to do some digging about it…

Setting up new Apple TV already raising questions like how I should separate it from other Apple TVs? Install it with different Apple ID or to separate network (WiFi or VLAN) or some other way? Have to do some digging about it…

I tested this by setting up another Apple TV with my wife’s apple id and created second home. Invited kids to that home so that part solved.

Haven’t figured out a way to publish device to second home if device is already published to main home. Is there any way to accomplish that?