Late last year, Philips Hue Matter support was said to be coming “by March 2023.” With just a few days left before that deadline, the company has now said that the release date has been put back to an unspecified time.
It’s the latest delay to hit the industry-wide Matter standard, which was itself pushed back from a planned 2020 launch to late 2022 …
What’s the Matter?
Matter is effectively a cross-company version of HomeKit. It’s a single standard which enables any compatible smart home device to be controlled by Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Zigbee, and more.
The big advantage is that while only a limited number of companies chose to support HomeKit, the broader market for Matter devices means that almost everyone will support it. For Apple users, this is essentially a way to bring HomeKit compatibility to a much wider range of devices.
Matter finally launched on November 3 of last year.
Philips Hue Matter support delayed
At the launch of Matter, Philips Hue owner Signify said that it would be adding Matter support to its products by March 2023. With just days to go before the deadline, the company has now said that this won’t happen.
HueBlog got a brief statement from Signify.
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.
The site speculates that the update is months away yet, rather than weeks.
The company says that the update will be worth waiting for, however, as it will result in slicker performance when running scenes controlling multiple Hue lights.
Whereas with Siri voice control, several Hue lamps in a room are sometimes switched on one after the other, after the Matter upgrade it will happen synchronised.
The other good news is that The Verge notes almost all existing Hue devices will be updated to support Matter.
The update, when it arrives, will bridge all of Hue’s existing lights, back to its original bulb launched in 2012, into any compatible Matter ecosystem. (The only Hue devices that won’t support Matter are the Hue Play Sync Box and Tap Dial Switch.)
If you’re impatient, you can apply for a developer account to get access to betas which support Matter, but given the somewhat chaotic state of the rollout, I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s already commonplace for smart home devices to require goat sacrifices during setup, so adding beta firmware into the mix would likely need a ready supply of puppies.
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