IKEA revamps its smart home product line with Matter, ditching ZigBee for Matter over Thread in favor of integration with other brands
Furniture retailer IKEA has announced that it will transition its in-house developed smart home products from
IKEA announces new Matter and sound products - IKEA Global
https://www.ikea.com/global/en/newsroom/sustainability/ikea-announces-new-chapter-in-designing-technology-for-the-home-250709/
Ikea ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes | The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/smart-home/701697/ikea-matter-thread-new-products-new-smart-home-strategy
Matter is a standard for the Internet of Things (IoT) and was officially released in October 2022 by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), a standards organization that includes Amazon, Apple, and Google.
IoT standards organization including Google, Apple, Amazon reorganizes and announces new smart home standard 'Matter' - GIGAZINE
IKEA's smart home products have been compatible with the ZigBee standard until now. However, IKEA's smart home hub 'DIRIGERA', released in 2023, will be compatible with Matter 1.4 in the beta update in July 2025, enabling Thread communication. More than 20 types of smart lights, sensors, and remote controls that use Matter over Thread are scheduled to be released. Since Matter is a standard widely adopted in the industry, it can be set up and used in other smart home ecosystems such as Apple Home, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa. Of course, DIRIGERA can also control smart home products from other manufacturers.
In addition, the ZigBee-enabled DIRIGERA will function as a Matter bridge, allowing IKEA's ZigBee-enabled products to be connected to a Matter-based smart home system. IKEA also announced that new Matter-enabled products will be equipped with ZigBee's 'Touchlink' feature, which allows devices to be paired directly with each other without a hub or app. This will maintain backward compatibility with IKEA's ZigBee-enabled products, for example, allowing new Thread-enabled light bulbs to be controlled with old ZigBee-enabled remote controls and vice versa.
According to IKEA, the retro radio-style Bluetooth speaker 'NATTBAD' will be released in July 2025, and the table speaker with lighting function 'BLOMPRAKT' will be released in October of the same year. In addition, a design collaboration product with Swedish designer Tekla Severin is scheduled to be released in January 2026.
'Matter enables interoperability, ease of use, and affordability for us, and the standardization process means more companies share the development work,' David Granath, IKEA's lighting and appliances manager, told The Verge, explaining the reasons for the move to Matter. 'We want to remove the barriers of complexity. We want it to be simple to use and just work.'
On the other hand, the social news site Hacker News did not seem to be receiving this announcement positively. Although IKEA and standards organizations claim that Matter is an 'open standard,' there are criticisms that in reality the certification system makes it closed. It was also pointed out that certification and fees are required to sell products, which creates a barrier to entry for small manufacturers and the DIY (do-it-yourself) community.
Furthermore, this change in policy was seen as a betrayal by many users who had been using IKEA's affordable and reliable ZigBee products to build their smart homes for years, especially those who had combined the company's open source smart home platform with Home Assistant .
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in Hardware, Posted by log1i_yk