Apple enables Thread control for smart home devices in iOS 18

In iOS 18, Apple quietly enabled the Thread radio found on recent iPhone models to directly control Apple Home and Matter devices.

Thread is a new IP-based smart home connectivity standard that has slowly been increasing in adoption in recent years. It's an alternative to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Zigbee and is incredibly low-power and fast.

It first debuted in the HomePod mini and a few Nanoleaf lights but there are now several smart home products that have utilized it.

Select iPhones — namely iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and the whole iPhone 16 line — have built-in Thread radios that presumably would have allowed direct control of accessories. But until now, no.

Those Thread radios still routed commands through what's known as a border router. Border routers bridge your Thread network to your home network.

Apple TV, HomePod, HomePod mini, and other third party products all act as border routers for your home. Not only did you have to have a border router to use Thread devices, but they also added one extra step when controlling accessories, slowing down commands.

The Eve Aqua water controller supports Thread

Thanks to iOS 18 that was just released, this has changed. Apple now says all those aforementioned iPhone models are able to directly connect to Thread devices.

This should speed up response time for Thread accessories as well as make them more approachable for consumers.

Other Apple products include Thread radios too, including recent Macs and iPads. So far Apple hasn't enabled the Thread radios on those devices though and doesn't include them on their compatibility list yet.

Recently, the Thread standard was upgraded to version 1.4 which made several platform improvements that will help with implementation, troubleshooting, and overall performance.

Anyone with an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max can update to iOS 18 now to start using Thread with any of their supported accessories.

Direct Thread support isn't the only change with iOS 18 for the smart home. Apple also announced it will finally allow robotic vacuum cleaners to be supported in the Home app.

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3 Comments

mike1 3437 comments · 10 Years

About 3 months ago

How would user know if this is how the command was transmitted, or would they?

brianjo 56 comments · 3 Years

A crappy thing about homekit is Apple doesn't give you an easy way to see where data is going. You just have to trust it. I get it from the 'make it easy to use' side of things, but it really sucks from a troubleshooting standpoint.

It would be awesome if they had log files available with things like protocols devices used, hops the signal went, etc. It would make it much much easier to troubleshoot and determine why things aren't working as they should.

dewme 5775 comments · 10 Years

brianjo said:

A crappy thing about homekit is Apple doesn't give you an easy way to see where data is going. You just have to trust it. I get it from the 'make it easy to use' side of things, but it really sucks from a troubleshooting standpoint.
It would be awesome if they had log files available with things like protocols devices used, hops the signal went, etc. It would make it much much easier to troubleshoot and determine why things aren't working as they should.

The open source Home Assistant app provides a lot more details and logs about connected home automation devices, including state changes, status, internal counters, etc. But I don't think it provides anything like path tracing, packet capture, or protocol dissection. I'm only starting to get my feet wet with Home Assistant but what I've seen so far is pretty good in terms of providing a lot more detail. It even exposes details from Ring device, Unifi devices, all kinds of printers, etc., some of which are difficult to get at using the dumbed down interfaces that some of these products come with. You can install it without impacting your other home automation equipment or systems like Apple Home or the Alexa app. It's available on the Mac and iOS/macOS app stores. Like any open source project it is always a work-in-progress and will likely have a few rough edges, but it's definitely worthy of looking at if you crave more details about your connected devices. I'm running the data acquisition part of the system on a Raspberry Pi 4B that's sitting in my network cabinet.

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