Sharing a Matter device from Home Assistant with Apple Home has always involved a small detour. Home Assistant opens a commissioning window and shows a QR code and a sharing code, and you then type the code into the Home app or scan the QR code with a second phone. Three pull requests merged on 26 October 2026 remove that step for people who use the Home Assistant Companion app on an iPhone.
One button instead of a code
The Matter "Share device" dialog gets a new button that passes the commissioning window straight to the Companion app. On iOS it reads "Add to Apple Home" and opens Apple's own setup flow on the same phone. The device keeps the name it has in Home Assistant, so you do not have to rename it in the Home app afterwards.
The frontend change, written by Raphael Hehl, has the same button for Android, labelled "Share with app", which hands the device to the Google Play Services share sheet, for example to add it to Google Home. The Android app side of that change was still an open pull request at the time of writing, and the updated documentation says the Android button will only appear in the full flavour of the app, not in the minimal flavour built without Google services.
The button is shown only when the Companion app announces that it supports sharing. In a regular browser, or in an older app, the dialog looks as before, with the code and the QR code.
Codes that run out
A Matter commissioning window stays open for a limited time. The dialog now treats the code as expired 30 seconds before the window closes. At that point it replaces the code with a "Get new code" action and refuses to start sharing, so you do not end up in the middle of Apple's setup with a code that stops working.
When you get it
The frontend part and the user documentation are in the development branch, and the documentation change is tagged for the next release, Home Assistant 2026.11. The iPhone part lives in the Companion app, which ships separately. The newest iOS app builds on GitHub, 2026.10.1 and the 2026.10.2 pre-release, came out before the merge, so the button will appear only after an app update that includes it.
On the iPhone the handoff already works with what the Matter server sends today, because Apple's parser reads the existing setup QR code. Android also needs the commissioning window's discriminator. Support for that is merged in matter.js and the Matter server, and still has to reach Home Assistant Core through a dependency update.