GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
The new Thread Networks Diagnostics Tools app from Thread Group, the standards body behind the wireless IoT protocol, officially launches in beta today. The app, which arrives on iOS today and has been available on Android in alpha for a few weeks, is the first dedicated tool to provide visibility into your Thread-based smart home network. I’ve been testing the Android version on my complicated home network and, with a bit of extra legwork, have diagnosed several issues with my Thread setup.
Thread is one of the protocols the smart home standard Matter runs on, and since Matter over Thread devices began arriving in 2023, there have been reports of people struggling to connect or keep Thread devices connected, along with multiple border routers causing issues. There have been ad hoc tools and apps that have provided some insight into your Thread network to help solve these, along with some high-level tools in Home Assistant, but for most users, Thread has been a black box.
This app is the first step in providing visibility into your Thread network. When connected to your home’s Wi-Fi network, the Thread Tools app can show you which devices are connected to which routers, which are acting as mesh extenders, and the signal strength of all those connections. For example, if your Thread door lock isn’t responding or is frequently disconnecting, you can check its signal strength and, if it’s weak, try moving a border router closer or add a mesh-extending device like a smart plug nearby.
You can export the very detailed data the app generates as a .json file and share it with a manufacturer or ecosystem to help with troubleshooting (or, as I did, feed it into Claude). For example, the recent issues Ikea has struggled with, where some users weren’t able to get their devices onboarded to their Thread network, could be helped by a tool like this.
These diagnostic tools have been available in the Thread spec since 1.4 launched in 2024; Ikea recently implemented some as part of its attempts to address those issues, but a dedicated tool should be able to paint a broader picture. Smart home blog Matter Alpha has published a deep dive into what the app reveals.
In my time with the alpha version on Android, I’ve found it fairly limited for troubleshooting my network. My biggest issue is multiple networks created by border routers from different manufacturers, and it only shows me the mesh details for one. (Merging networks is something that’s planned for the app in the future).
When I open the app, I do see a list of all of my networks and which Border Routers serve them, but I can only connect to one to view its mesh details. That’s likely because it’s the network the Pixel phone I’m using is connected to. Fingers crossed the iOS version, which launches today, offers insights into the other networks, since most of them were set up using my iPhone.
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