I have only been using Matter products for one day and I really REALLY hate the entire experience. Not sure why one more annoying standard had to be invented.
After hours of fighting with the IKEA devices yesterday (3 air quality sensors) they finally integrated with the IKEA app via the Dirigera hub.
Now I’m trying to integrate the devices with SmartThings, and it doesn’t work. Apparently I need a hub (what???) to add the Dirigera IKEA hub to SmartThings. Scanning the QR code generated by the IKEA app from SmartThings doesn’t work.
Does SmartThings only work with Samsung hubs? Do I need a Samsung hub to connect to the IKEA hub, or is this just a bug?
The error message is “Couldn’t add device / You need a hub to connect to this device / View supported hubs”. But the IKEA app shows SmartThings a supported integration, so this makes no sense whatsoever.
I’m a software developer with tens of years of experience. I can’t imagine how much more frustrating this would be for non-technical users.
Every Matter device or Matter bridge requires the Matter controller of the platform you want to integrate that device into. That usually means the hub of the platform: Google Home or Alexa need one of their smart speakers or smart displays, Home Assistant a Matter server, Hubitat, Homey or SmartThings their hubs, IKEA Home Smart the DIRIGERA.
The new Matter products from IKEA connect directly to SmartThings and for that you need a SmartThings hub, which can be the Aeotec or some Samsung appliances like TVs or monitors.
There is no cloud integration, which would be the only way a hub would not be required. The integration is local and SmartThings, or any other platform, needs a local piece of hardware in your network to talk to local Matter devices.
I doubt that’s the case. For example, I just tried integrating the IKEA hub with Google Home, and that worked perfectly without any additional hubs, and now the sensors work with Google Home.
If Samsung requires an additional hub, it’s clearly a Samsung bug or problem. Even Tuya, although it doesn’t support those particular sensors, can add them to their app without any additional hubs.
So whatever the cause of this is, it’s either caused by something Samsung decided (requiring a Samsung hub), or by some mistake Samsung did (for example a bug).
Samsung Smart Things is listed as a supported app by IKEA, and it even tries to integrate with it, so clearly this was supposed to work. I have 5 Samsung devices in my house (a washer, two tablets, a phone, buds), but no actual hubs.
If Samsung really wants a Samsung hub to integrate SmartThings with other matter devices, I’ll try to avoid Samsung products in the future.
The question is how you are integrating it. IKEA offers a cloud integration with Google Home that, of course, did not require any hub since it worked over the Internet using Google and IKEA servers but relied on the Internet even to turn on a light.
IKEA has recently deprecated all cloud integrations in favour of Matter integration which is local. Local integrations like Matter do require a Matter controller, which for Google Home is a smart speaker or certain Google TV devices.
Apparently the Google and IKEA apps communicate with each other on my Android devices, from what I see, at least initially. At the moment, Google Home is saying “Connected through: IKEA Home smart” for the IKEA sensors.
If there is additional communication over the Internet between the Google and IKEA servers, I can’t be sure, there might be. I do have a Google TV device (a newer 4K Chromecast), but I just unplugged it, and the IKEA sensor reported temperatures still update in Google Home. I also have a very old Nest thermostat, but I doubt that has anything to do with this.
Either way, I’m not buying another Samsung device that I don’t actually need just to have the IKEA sensors visible in SmartThings. The IKEA hub was expensive enough.
That’s the cloud integration then that is now considered deprecated although still works for existing users. The sensors connect to IKEA DIRIGERA hub, DIRIGERA to IKEA servers and IKEA servers to Google Home servers. If there’s no Internet or there’s a cloud outage in any service, Google Home cannot use the sensors.
With Matter integration, if the sensors are the new Matter ones, they connect directly to the hub of the platform. No DIRIGERA needed unless you want to use IKEA app, they would connect directly to a Google Home hub or SmartThings hub or hubs of other platforms. It’s the point of Matter after all, being local and not needing a hub/bridge for each device brand, just the hub of your smart home platform.
Yeah, the theory sounds good. In practice, the app also has to know how to work with a particular device, not just the Matter hub. So it’s not enough to have, let’s say, a Xiaomi hub and Xiaomi app to use the IKEA sensors, if the Xiaomi app has no idea what those sensors are and how to use them.
This means you can’t just buy the sensors and use them with any app. You have to use one of the apps that support them. Which at the moment seem to be, in my particular case, IKEA (through their IKEA hub), SmartThings (through Samsung hubs), or Google Home (through the internet connection to IKEA, and maybe through some Google hubs).
Needless to say, this is a big problem. If you have Matter devices from 10 manufacturers, in extreme cases you might need 10 hubs to be able to use all the devices, because each app is compatible with a subset of devices, and only one hub.
That’s obviously not OK. The hubs should be interoperable with any app. I don’t have to buy a Internet router for Apple devices, one for Android devices, and one for Windows devices. It should be the same for these Matter hubs.
So, the situation is that we now have a new standard that just complicates things further, and interoperability is based on your luck. Having all the devices on this new type of network is useless if there are custom protocols all over the place to connect this network to a regular IP network and the Internet, even when it doesn’t make any sense.
IKEA sensors precisely follow Matter standards, which is the ideal scenario for compatibility. Any Matter-compatible platform knows how to recognize a Matter motion sensor or a temperature sensor or a light, regardless of the brand.
Of course there are other brands that add non-standard features or only add them to their proprietary protocols or they are not even Matter compatible on their own and may require you to buy their own hub. That’s something that is worth researching before buying, what features does the vendor offer through Matter for other platforms and which ones belong to their walled garden or ecosystem.
Still, Matter has been a revolution when it comes to smart home integrations and, even if it’s in its infancy, it’s evolving quickly.
