Another bump in the road for the smart home standard
Update: Matter now live on Philips Hue
The Matter rollout continues to be anything but plain sailing as Signify, parent company of Philips Hue, has announced that it won’t be making its system Matter compatible in Q1 2023, as it originally said it would at the Matter 1.0 launch at the end of last year.
Signify intends to make its Hue bridges rather than its bulbs Matter devices, and the plan was to have this done via a firmware update.
Slated for a Q1 rollout, we are now days away from Q2 and there’s still no sign of it.
And now there’s official word that it isn’t happening.
Speaking to Hueblog, a Signify statement read:
“For the launch of Matter, we are working together with many partners in the smart home industry. With Philips Hue, we always focus on convincing quality to meet our customers’ expectations. Therefore, we will take a little more time than originally planned for the Philips Hue Bridge software update before making it available to all consumers. We will inform you as soon as we have a concrete date for the release of the Matter software update.”
That’s pretty damning, as it pretty much says that they don’t think Matter is up to the standards that their users would accept.
It’s another bump in the road for Matter’s launch which has been, if we’re honest, pretty messy.
Amazon was the first big brand to, sort of, put the boot in when it said Matter over Thread wasn’t ready at launch, there’s a big issue between iOS and non-Apple platforms, and we’ve seen other brands like Belkin revise their Matter plans too.
We hope that, in the long term, Matter thrives as it does have the potential to make everything a lot more seamless within the smart home but it’s definitely not a great start.
Explainer: What is Matter smart home
