Ikea just announced a bunch of super cheap, colorful Matter-over-Thread devices that will work with any platform, and it feels like Christmas came early for the smart home.

The 21 new products include a line of smart bulbs starting at just £4 and two new remote controls that start at just £3 (US pricing is not yet confirmed). Ikea also officially updated its Dirigera hub to a Matter controller and Thread border router to support the new products, which will start to arrive in the US in January.

It’s a big shift toward a simpler, more open smart home, a vote of confidence in Matter from a major mainstream brand, and great news for users, who get affordable, Matter-compatible devices that work with any smart home platform.

“The baseline for the new products was shifting to a new technology — from Zigbee to Thread,” David Granath, range manager at Ikea of Sweden, told The Verge in an interview. “But we also looked to make them more affordable, easier to use, and more interoperable.”

What this means for your smart home

Ikea’s new Thread products more or less replace its existing Zigbee products — from contact, motion, and leak sensors to smart plugs, smart bulbs, and air quality sensors (see the full details here). They will start launching in Europe this month and arrive in the US in January, with the lighting line expected to follow in April.

1/3The Bilresa remote comes in two versions; this is the scroll wheel option. Image: Ikea

The new Bilresa remotes look likely to be the breakout hit. These replace the Trådfri remotes, and not only can they now control any compatible Ikea device (or Matter device or scene), but there’s also a model with a scroll wheel for adjusting brightness, volume, and shades. And they come in colors! “We did this to make it feel more like home furnishing,” says Granath. “But it also adds more function, because now you can easily identify which remote to use.”

The new Kajplats smart bulbs have better color and get brighter than the Trådfri line they replace, says Granath. The adjustable-white bulbs now have options up to 1,521 lumens, and the color-changing E26 has a broader spectrum and gets up to 1,100 lumens.

The brand-new Timmerflotte temperature and humidity sensor is a battery-powered button with a neat dot matrix display that shows the current values when you push it. The redesigned indoor air quality sensor, Alpstuga, adds CO2 monitoring and a more home-friendly design, including a clock.

1/3The new smart plug offers energy monitoring. Image: Ikea

While we don’t have US pricing yet, in the UK, the remote control will start at just £3 (approximately $4), and the most expensive product in the line will be the Alpstuga clock / IAQ monitor at £25 (approximately $33). Consider that a Thread button from Arre costs $25, and Amazon’sIAQ monitor is $70 — you can see just how disruptive this pricing will be.

“This first step is laying the foundation to make the smart home successful.”

As with Ikea’s current products, all the new devices will work out of the box with no need for the Dirigera hub or a Matter controller. This is because they still use TouchLink, a Zigbee feature that allows direct pairing (even though the devices’ protocol is Thread, not Zigbee).

For example, the new smart bulbs can connect to and be controlled by the new remotes without requiring any additional hardware. And everything is backward-compatible with all Ikea Zigbee products, so you can use the new remotes to control your Trådfri lights or Fyrtur blinds directly.

If you do want to set up automations and schedules, you can pair the new devices to the Dirigera hub and Ikea’s Home Smart app or any other Matter-compatible ecosystem, such as Apple Home or Google Home.

1/3*The Dirigera hub is now a Thread border router. *

To support the new hardware, the Dirigera hub is now a Thread border router; the good news is that it’s running Thread 1.4, which adds Thread credential sharing. When I enabled it in my home, it connected nicely to my main Thread network instead of creating its own, resulting in a stronger mesh network. Ikea is just the second platform to adopt Thread 1.4, following Samsung SmartThings, which did so last month.

Until recently, Dirigera was only a Matter bridge, meaning it exposed devices on it to other Matter ecosystems. Ikea added Matter controller function in beta this summer, but this week turned it on for everyone.

This means the hub can also onboard Matter devices from other ecosystems to Ikea’s Home Smart app, as long as they’re in categories where Ikea has products, such as sensors, lights, and buttons (but no locks, robot vacuums, or appliances). So you could pair Philips Hue’s new Thread bulbs or Matter-over-Wi-Fi bulbs from brands like Linkind to the hub and have them all work with Ikea’s Adaptive Lighting feature or in any schedules or automations you set in the Ikea app.

The hub supports Matter 1.3, so energy and air quality readings from a connected Eve Energy smart plug or Eve Weather air quality monitor will now show in Home Smart. Ikea’s own smart plugs and IAQ sensors can also share this data with Matter-compatible platforms.

What this means for Ikea

This is a major investment in the smart home for the furniture giant. The company has dabbled in the space successfully for years, but it’s never felt like a priority. Granath says this is largely because it was too complicated and confusing, something they didn’t want to pass on to the customer.

But Matter has changed that with its promise of interoperability. “That’s the whole point of this journey,” says Granath. “Removing the barriers so that in the end, customers don’t have to think about these things but can still enjoy the benefits.”

“Ikea is well-positioned to have home furnishings that have superpowers”

While he says the transition has been challenging for the team, particularly adopting the relatively new Thread protocol and launching so many new products at once, Granath believes it sets the stage for Ikea to move into a truly smart future. “This first step is laying the foundation to make the smart home successful. It needs to be affordable enough, simple enough, and interoperable,” he says. “Matter allows us to get there — over time, at least.”

Granath predicts that Ikea’s progress in the smart home will now be much more rapid, especially with the quick pace of innovation AI is bringing, because, sooner rather than later, customers will expect their home furnishings to be smart. “They will just expect to talk to my voice assistant and say ‘turn off the lights in the kitchen’ and have it happen,” he says. And Ikea will be ready to deliver. “I think we will get to that point rather soon, and we are well-positioned to have home furnishings that have superpowers.”

What is Matter

Developed by Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, and others, Matter is an open-sourced, IP-based connectivity software layer for smart home devices. It works over Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and Thread.

Thread is a low-power, wireless mesh protocol. It operates on the same 2.4GHz spectrum as Zigbee and is designed for low-power devices, such as sensors, light bulbs, plugs, and shades. IP-based, Thread devices can communicate directly with each other, the internet, and with other networks using a Thread Border Router.

Today, Matter supports most of the main device types in the home, including lighting, thermostats, locks, robot vacuums, refrigerators, dishwashers, dryers, ovens, smoke alarms, air quality monitors, EV chargers, and more.

A smart home gadget with the Matter logo can be set up and used with any Matter-compatible ecosystem via a Matter controller and controlled by more than one ecosystem with a feature called multi-admin.

Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, Apple Home, Home Assistant, Ikea, and Aqara are among the well-known smart home companies supporting Matter, along with hundreds of device manufacturers.

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• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy