Ikea's HomeKit-ready Smart Shades to ship in August

One of the most hotly anticipated HomeKit products in recent memory, Ikea's Smart Shades, will finally launch in August after a months-long delay, the company says.

The new launch date was spotted on Ikea's flagship Swedish website by a Reddit user.

"We appreciate your interest in our smart blinds KADRILJ and FYRTUR," text reads. "These blinds were intended to be sold in February, but will now be available in August, according to our forecasts."

Ikea first confirmed a lengthy delay in March, saying it needed the time for "an opportunity for improved functionality" — something repeated in the latest news. That's believed to refer to out-of-the-box support for HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant, at least with a Tradfri hub.

Very few HomeKit-compatible shades are on the market, typically because of factors like custom sizing and elaborate electronics. That can also push prices into the thousands of dollars for a living room or kitchen.

The Smart Shades get around this hurdle with a limited selection of sizes, and a rechargeable battery that has to be periodically removed. People will be able to buy extra battery packs to minimize downtime.

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17 Comments

M68000

said about 4 years ago

Thanks for the update on this. Looks like a cool product

tjwolf

said about 4 years ago

I wonder how Ikea deals with the non-standard widths of US windows? Will they sell 2-3 widths and let the customer cut them to the exact size at home?

StrangeDays

said about 4 years ago

Very cool. The ones I'd heard were good, Serena, were ridiculously priced for my window dimensions -- like $600 a window. Yeaaaahh, no.

Sweden has some long summer nites and while visiting friends I appreciated their blackout shades. Good to see Ikea getting into this space! Will def keep my eye open for what they come up with...only drawback is the styles of rolling shades tend to limit themselves to pretty boring beige-modern.

eightzero

said about 4 years ago

It seems like this is ripe for some engineering efforts to existing installations. Can someone make a motor unit to retrofit onto existing blinds and shades? Maybe less than thousands?

jbdragon

said about 4 years ago

eightzero said:

It seems like this is ripe for some engineering efforts to existing installations. Can someone make a motor unit to retrofit onto existing blinds and shades? Maybe less than thousands?

You can get kits for 2-3" Blinds. You can see them here at mysmartblinds.com. The only issue is no Homekit support. I converted 2 of my blinds. They have a solar panel option so you don't have to worry about charging up the battery pack. You can use the app, or get the Hub allowing Alexa, and I think Google support. There was suppose to be SIRI support also, but that's been removed a while back and so I haven't updated any of my other blinds. So I use Alexa on my Ecobee 4. Sometimes Alexa on my Apple Watch. But this only tilts the blinds from close to open. It doesn't pull these type of blinds UP and down. But that's generally all I did manually anyway. You still have manual control.

I don't see any easy way to retrofit roll up type blinds. These Ikea ones look interesting, but it seems like it's really going to be a select few windows. I don't expect them to fit any of my Windows.