Philips Hue adds Matter support to existing bridges
William GallagherHue Guide Lights
The delayed addition of Matter to the Philips Hue range of smart home products is reportedly now live in an update available to the company's bridge devices.
Matter is intended to become a kind of superset of smart home devices, with previously incompatible offerings from Apple, Google, and more, now all working together. Through each manufacturer supporting Matter, it should become possible to mix and match devices previously intended exclusively for HomeKit, or Alexa, and so on.
In 2022, Hue's parent company Signify committed to adding Matter support, but it was then delayed from its promised March 2023 debut. Then in August 2023, Hue again committed to the standard, and said that its support would go live in September.
Now according to the German tech site Hueblog, that support is live. Reportedly, the update is rolling out worldwide.
Hueblog says that the release comes with an update to the iOS Hue app. Where it previously had a setting for Voice Control, there is now a "Smart Home" option which includes all the Matter-related settings.
Philips Hue is best known for its range of smart light bulbs. However, more recently it also expanded into producing security cameras.
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
Marko Zivkovic
1 Comment
🤦🏽♂️ I read through this article, thought cool I should go add the bridge to HomeKit, and followed the instructions. (You'll need to have an account linked btw.) The Hue app provides code for the bridge, and you can add that to the HomeKit app.
At this point I should have asked myself, should I do this, what additional benefits do it I get, and most importantly are there any repercussions... Once the hub is added, HK also adds all of the individual lights connected to the hub. So now I have a bunch of individual lights in the HomeKit Default Room, that are in some cases duplicates of stand-alone lights, and in other cases are individual lights from a group that was already setup in the Hue app.
So if you have everything setup already, then you probably do not need to try this out. Also, if you are in this duplicate lights situation, you can view the HomeKit Home Settings and remove one of the duplicate bridges, but be really sure you are removing the one that isn't already correctly setup. Its lights will all be in the Default Room, just ignore the hub's name which might include the word Default. 😉