It’s fair to say, I am Govee fan, they have some good lighting products but as with all home tech, their app isn’t as good. Same thing with Meross.
If you have a smart home (Matter devices used by Apple Home and Home Assistant), the way you pair these lights is not as you’d think.
Matter has a concept called a fabric. Think of a fabric as one smart home ecosystem: Apple Home is a fabric, Home Assistant is a fabric, Google Home is a fabric, and so on. When you scan that QR code on the side of the light, you’re not “registering” the device in some general sense. You’re commissioning it into one specific fabric, and that original setup code is a one-shot. Once it’s been used, it’s spent.
So the moment Apple Home grabs your Govee strip, the code on the box is dead. Trying it again in Home Assistant gets you nowhere, because Home Assistant is a second, completely separate fabric, and it needs its own way in.
That’s fine, you can generate a one-time code from a fabric you’ve already added to. Great.
The issue comes when the Govee app is used and then appears to completely trash whatever you’ve done before it. (Especially if you want it there for firmware updates).
So unlike what is the usually intuitive step of scanning the code in to Home/HA, add to their App first and then generate one-time codes.
This will save you hours and hours of misery.
(and if you’re stuck in this process, don’t just reset the network, factory reset the device and then start with their app first)