GoKawiilIkea smart home products have long been the preferred choice of those who want to begin or expand a smart home at an affordable price. The company’s use of physical remotes also simplified the process for those new to the technology.
But when the company expanded its lineup with some budget Matter-over-Thread devices, things rather quickly headed south – with Apple Home users among those affected …
We saw a growing number of complaints from frustrated users who were often unable to even add the devices to their smart home networks. Ikea acknowledged the problem, and gave a hint as to its nature.
“We are aware that some customers are experiencing connection issues when setting up their devices in certain home environments, and we take that very seriously. We have a dedicated team reviewing the raised concerns and working closely with our ecosystem partners, and the Connectivity Standards Alliance, to better understand the issues and improve the experience.”
That statement appeared to point to a more fundamental issue with the Matter standard, and a new report by The Verge says this is indeed the case.
What has become clear since Matter’s enthusiastic launch is that Apple, Google, and Amazon are now fully focused on pursuing their own agendas. The cooperative spirit that defined the standard’s early development has stalled, and it’s every platform for itself in the race for users. Rather than being a plug-and-play solution for manufacturers — make a Matter device, and it will just work with any platform — there remains a huge onus on each manufacturer to ensure its devices work properly with each platform before release. Which is basically the same problem they had before Matter launched.
The site’s Jennifer Tuohy was personally affected by this and went looking for solutions. She found a video by A Smarter House which tried all of the various approaches that have been proposed in various forums and found that there was no single fix. Here’s what they found for those using Apple Home:
In Apple Home, devices may stall during onboarding and eventually time out. Reports indicate that repeated add/remove cycles can leave a residual state within the ecosystem, which sometimes resolves after a delay. When using DIRIGERA as a bridge, newly added devices may fail to appear until both the hub and Apple border router devices are restarted.
9to5Mac’s Take
Matter had one job, and it seems to be failing at it.
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