Ikea’s new smart-home hub and app support Matter standard

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Ikea will launch a new smart home hub and Home app with support for the new Matter standard.
Ikea will launch a new smart home hub and Home app with support for the new Matter standard.
Photo: Ikea

Ikea, known for a growing array of smart home products in recent years, said Wednesday it will soon replace it’s HomeKit-compatible Tradfri gateway with a new hub and Home app that support the upcoming Matter standard.

Matter is a smart-home technology standard Apple, Amazon, Google, the Connectivity Standards Alliance and others are working on to make smart home-automation products work together — even when they come from different brands.

Ikea to launch Dirigera smart-home hub and revamped Home app with support for Matter standard

As Ikea put it in a press release Wednesday:

The next step on the journey to enable a better everyday life for the many people and a smarter living is to launch the Matter ready hub for smart products DIRIGERA. With its new software, DIRIGERA is built to handle more product segments and onboard more products than the existing TRÅDFRI gateway. It also enables the new and more user-friendly IKEA Home smart app.

The Matter standard has seen multiple delays with the latest launch planned for this fall. That roughly coincides with Ikea’s planned October release of the Dirigera hub and the updated Home app.

The goal of Matter is to make sure smart home devices will work with customers’ setups cross-platform, including HomeKit. And it will also make them faster, more reliable, secure and easy to use.

One of the technologies Matter uses to make that happen is Thread networking, which many smart devices have adopted. Many companies hyped their Thread- and Matter-ready products at CES 2022 in January.

Ikea said connecting smart devices to the new Dirigera Matter hub will be “significantly easier” than it is with the Tradfri hub.

Overhauled Home app

And alongside the new Digera hub, Ikea is revamping its Home app.

“The new IKEA Home smart app will be convenient, easy to navigate, and user-friendly to lower the threshold for people looking into setting up a smart home,” said Ikea.

Rest assured, if you have the current Ikea Home app and Tradfri gateway, they will continue to work. And come October, Dirigera will work with all existing Ikea smart-home devices, the company said.

The company also said that “many more” new smart-home products are “to come in the future.”

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