Ikea’s new Matter smart home devices are having connection problems

I’ve spent the last two weeks trying – and mostly failing – to test out Ikea’s new Matter-over-Thread gear. These highly anticipated smart home devices include programmable buttons, smart bulbs, outlets, and temperature and motion sensors, all of which should work with any smart home platform and start at just $6.

But I’ve run into several obstacles trying to connect them to any smart home platform, and I’m not alone. The Tradfri subreddit is filled with Ikea customers sharing similar frustrations, reviews on the Ikea website pointing to problems, and colleagues from The edge also had problems.

Of the six devices I’ve tried to connect, I’ve so far managed to integrate a single Kajplats smart bulb into Apple Home – after seven attempts – and an Alpstuga IAQ monitor into Home Assistant – after a failed pairing with Apple Home.

A Bilresa smart button initially connected to Amazon Alexa, then fell off the network and refused to reconnect. The Timmerflotte temperature sensor and the Myggspray motion sensor simply refused to connect to anything, even Ikea’s Dirigera hub.

Although many people had no problems, there were enough posts on user forums about not being able to connect the new devices – or having difficulty making multiple resets before pairing – to suggest that my problems were not simply the result of my extremely complicated network, and could be a sign of a more serious problem. One Reddit user posted a particularly striking example: of the 60 Ikea Bilresa buttons they tried to pair, only 31 connected, for a success rate of 52%.

Additionally, after a few weeks in homes, a handful of users are now reporting difficulty keeping their devices connected once they are finally paired. The edge David Pierce had this problem with the Bilresa smart button connected via Amazon Alexa, and a few users on the Ikea Tradfri subreddit had problems with the Kajplats bulbs.

These are Ikea’s first products to use Matter-over-Thread, rather than Zigbee, the connectivity protocol that its previous Tradfri smart home range was based on. The main advantage of Matter is that devices should connect directly to one of the major platforms – Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings – without needing Ikea’s Dirigera hub or a cloud connection. You should also be able to log in to multiple platforms via Matter’s multi-admin feature. For now, I’d be happy with being able to connect to just one!

I contacted Ikea and David Granath, smart home range manager at Ikea, told me they were aware of the issues and were investigating. “The launch of our Matter range was highly anticipated and, for most customers, the products performed perfectly as expected,” he said. “That said, we are aware that some customers are experiencing connection issues when setting up their devices in some home environments, and we take this very seriously.

“We have a dedicated team reviewing the concerns raised and working closely with our ecosystem partners and the Connectivity Standards Alliance, to better understand the issues and improve the experience,” Granath continued, adding that the team will share more when they can. In the meantime, they offered some troubleshooting tips.

The deployment of new technologies is often fraught with pitfalls, as Ikea knows well. And as Granath hinted, the wide variety of configurations and network environments in the smart home can be difficult to anticipate. It’s only once products are released into the real world that some problems become visible. But while connectivity and configuration issues initially plagued Matter devices, concerted action by the CSA last year appears to have resolved most of them.

The difference here might be that this is one of the first large-scale deployments of Matter-over-Thread devices. As I previously reported, Thread network infrastructure is not only confusing to users, but also the least robust, thanks in part to the continued lack of interoperability between Thread border routers.

However, the fact that so many people are experiencing issues suggests that this is a bigger problem than just user configuration. The nature of this problem remains unclear; It could be the way Ikea implemented the Matter specification, a problem with how devices interact with specific platforms, or something in the Matter specification itself.

Ikea, the CSA and platform creators must realize this quickly. The launch of Ikea’s cheap Matter devices was supposed to be a watershed moment for the smart home – proof that the standard was finally ready for the mass market. Instead, it feels like another reminder that in the smart home, the hardest part is getting things to work.