Commissioning Matter over Thread devices with Skyconnect on iOS | Home Assistant | Page 1

red mason Mar 7, 2025, 9:49 AM

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I've been troubleshooting this for ages and I found some posts online that claim that commissioning new MoT devices through the companion app on an iPhone is not supported. Can anybody confirm this if this is indeed still accurate? Right now I think I have everything set up correctly with the Skyconnect, Matter and Open Thread Border Router add-ons but adding devices does not seem to work. If this is the case, would this work on an android device?

red mason Mar 7, 2025, 10:20 AM

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Commissioning Matter over Thread devices with Skyconnect on iOS

torn compass Mar 7, 2025, 10:48 AM

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I use Apple TVs as my OTBR, and iPhone commissioning works fine.

royal perch Mar 7, 2025, 1:38 PM

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The problem used to be that OTBR couldn’t be used by Apple as a Home Hub, so you couldn’t use it for Apples version of matter. You could use OTBR as part of a mesh with Apple TVs and HomePods, if you could extract the secret key, but that’s baked into the app now.

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Does Apple still require a functional home hub to set up matter devices onto non Apple matter fabrics? I don’t know.

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(The way commissioning works is that Apple configures it, then shares it to HA, so a lot of the commissioning work is done via the iOS SDK/ecosystem)

red mason Mar 10, 2025, 8:35 AM

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hmm interesting. In the meantime I borrowed an old android device and after syncing the credentials it added the devices flawlessly, so I'm thinking on Apple it still not quite working

vestal jungle Mar 10, 2025, 9:58 AM

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I have 2 hardwired AppleTVs 4K 3rd Gen, 1 HomePod v2 and 4HomePod Minis. Commissioning via my iPhone works absolutely flawless and without issues.

red mason Mar 10, 2025, 11:40 AM

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ok, but are you adding the devices to apple home or HA? My goal is to connect the devices directly toHA

royal perch Mar 10, 2025, 4:49 PM

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You mentioned OTBR in original post. But not HomePods or Apple TVs. Just to confirm - is it just OTBR on its own?

red mason Mar 11, 2025, 8:55 AM

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yes, just otbr with the skyconnect dongle

royal perch Mar 11, 2025, 10:59 AM

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Right. So setups with those things aren’t likely to be useful for you to set your expectations.

red mason Mar 11, 2025, 11:07 AM

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I'm not sure what you mean by that

royal perch Mar 11, 2025, 11:09 AM

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Their setups are too different to yours to be a yardstick for your experience

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If you have HomePods and iOS and no sky connect that’s sort of the happy path for the iOS ecosystem. It’s the one that Apple have tested the most. Their apis onboarding devices onto their mesh and their border routers. It works well.

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If you add a sky connect to that setup then you aren’t changing that much, it’s still an Apple managed network being commissioned by Apple APIs and there’s still an Apple “home hub”.

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Take the Apple border routers away and now you are trying to use Apple APIs with no home hub to commission devices on to a non Apple network. It’s suddenly quite different

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What id like to hear someone tell you is that they have a sky connect only mesh that they provision to through the iOS HA app

red mason Mar 11, 2025, 11:27 AM

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So, I don't have an apple home ecosystem. I have an iPhone that I'm trying to use to commission devices using the companion app to my homeassistant instance which is running OTBR.

royal perch Mar 11, 2025, 11:27 AM

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On iOS, HA leverages the iOS matter sdk, which is why there is a difference between these different setups.

red mason Mar 11, 2025, 11:27 AM

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so I'm thinking this still isn't working/supported. Using an Android device I was able to commission the device flawlessly

#Commissioning Matter over Thread devices with Skyconnect on iOS