For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying—and mostly failing—to test Ikea’s new Matter-over-Thread gear. These highly anticipated smart home devices include programmable buttons, smart bulbs, plugs, and temperature and motion sensors — all of which should work with any smart home platform and start at just $6.
But I’ve run into a few walls trying to connect them to any smart home platform, and I’m not alone. The Tradfri subreddit is full of Ikea customers who share similar frustrations, reviews on the Ikea website point out problems, and colleagues on The Verge they also had problems.
Of the six devices I’ve tried to connect, I’ve only successfully integrated one Kajplats smart bulb into Apple Home so far – after seven attempts – and one Alpstuga IAQ monitor into Home Assistant – after it failed to pair with Apple Home.
The Bilresa smart button initially connected to Amazon Alexa, then dropped out of the network and refused to pair again. The Timmerflotte temperature sensor and Myggspray motion sensor simply refused to connect to anything, even Ikea’s own Dirigera hub.
“We are aware that some customers are experiencing connectivity issues when setting up their devices in certain home environments, and we take this very seriously.”
—David Granath, Ikea
While plenty of people haven’t had any problems, there have been enough posts on user forums about not being able to connect new devices – or how they’ve struggled with multiple resets before pairing – to suggest that my problems weren’t just the result of my wildly over-complicated network and could be indicative of a bigger problem. One Reddit user posted a particularly eyebrow-raising example: out of 60 Ikea Bilresa buttons they tried to pair, only 31 connected, with a success rate of 52 percent.
Additionally, after a few weeks in people’s homes, a handful of users are now reporting trouble keeping the devices connected once they’re finally paired. The Verge’s David Pierce had this problem with a Bilresa smart button connected via Amazon Alexa, and several users on the Ikea Tradfri subreddit had problems with Kajplats bulbs.
These are the first Ikea products to use Matter-over-Thread, rather than Zigbee, the connection protocol that Tradfri’s previous range of smart homes relied on. The main advantage of the Matter is that the devices should connect directly to any of the major platforms – Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings – without the need for an Ikea Conductor hub or cloud connection. You should also be able to connect to more than one platform through Matter’s multi-admin feature. Right now I’d settle for only being able to join one!
I contacted Ikea and David Granath, Range Manager for Smart Home at Ikea, told me that they are aware of the issues and are investigating. “The launch of our Matter range has been highly anticipated and for the majority of customers, the products are working seamlessly as intended,” he said. “However, we know that some customers are experiencing connectivity issues when setting up their devices in certain home environments, and we take this very seriously.
“We have a dedicated team looking into the concerns raised and working closely with our ecosystem partners and the Connectivity Standards Alliance to better understand the issues and improve the experience,” continued Granath, adding that the team will share more as soon as possible. In the meantime, they offered some troubleshooting tips.
As Ikea knows well, implementing new technologies is often fraught with problems. And as Granath pointed out, the wide variety of network setups and environments in a smart home are hard to predict. Some problems become visible only after the products reach the real world. But while connection and setup failures initially plagued the Matter devices, a concerted push from the CSA last year seems to have fixed most of them.
The difference here may be that this is one of the first large-scale deployments of Matter-over-Thread. As I stated earlier, Thread’s network infrastructure is not only confusing for users, but also the least robust, due in part to the persistent lack of interoperability between Thread border routers.
However, the fact that so many people are experiencing problems suggests a bigger problem than just user settings. What this problem remains unclear; it could be how Ikea implemented the Matter specification, a problem with how devices interact with specific platforms, or something in the Matter specification itself.
Ikea, CSA and platform builders need to figure this out fast. The launch of low-cost Ikea Matter devices was supposed to be a breakthrough moment for the smart home – proof that the standard was finally ready for the mass market. Instead, it looks like another reminder that the hardest part of the smart home is still just getting things up and running.