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Philips Hue Bridge Matter Support Update Now Available
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Thats exactly the steps I took. When it said it wasn't available I went into Home to add an accessory. When it listed my bridge I canceled the process then went back into Hue and was able to complete it there. Bit of a PITA.
Hate fiddling with Hue but thought I would transfer my setup to matter anyway and it was honesty extremely painless. I went went into the Hue app, added other, got the code, added an accessory on the Home app and choose more options and tapped "my accessory isn't shown here" and pasted in the code manually.
I never unpaired my previous Hue and Siri setup first because it would have ended up removing all the rooms so more work plus I didn't want to unpair first only for it to mess up on the re-pairing which it has before with Hue. The Home app paired the bridge and detected all my stuff just fine the first time with no complaints whatsoever, 37 lights, 14 accessories and 2 Hue plugs, all names were the same as the Hue app that I could tell so that made things far easier but I could just tap identify anyway if I wasn't sure so it flashed the bulb.
Once all devices were added I manually removed the Hue bridge using the old setup from the Home app only (went from the Hue app automatically) so only the matter pairing was there and that was pretty much it, I did have to group my lights again and setup any automations and scenes but this takes no time at all.
All grouped lights come on and go off as commanded and my scenes work great. I'm very pleased this was painless as I did try out matter a few months ago when it was in beta and pairing was a nightmare with constant failures, and when I did get things working and grouped up, some bulbs came on at the brightness they should and one in the group always seemed to stay very dimmed at 5% everytime I turned it on, no issues like that now and it seems to be a little more responsive when I give voice commands, all the issues I had in the matter beta are gone for me so I'm very happy
I never unpaired my previous Hue and Siri setup first because it would have ended up removing all the rooms so more work plus I didn't want to unpair first only for it to mess up on the re-pairing which it has before with Hue. The Home app paired the bridge and detected all my stuff just fine the first time with no complaints whatsoever, 37 lights, 14 accessories and 2 Hue plugs, all names were the same as the Hue app that I could tell so that made things far easier but I could just tap identify anyway if I wasn't sure so it flashed the bulb.
Once all devices were added I manually removed the Hue bridge using the old setup from the Home app only (went from the Hue app automatically) so only the matter pairing was there and that was pretty much it, I did have to group my lights again and setup any automations and scenes but this takes no time at all.
All grouped lights come on and go off as commanded and my scenes work great. I'm very pleased this was painless as I did try out matter a few months ago when it was in beta and pairing was a nightmare with constant failures, and when I did get things working and grouped up, some bulbs came on at the brightness they should and one in the group always seemed to stay very dimmed at 5% everytime I turned it on, no issues like that now and it seems to be a little more responsive when I give voice commands, all the issues I had in the matter beta are gone for me so I'm very happy
Mine showed the same message but it took me through the whole setup. I don’t know how to tell if the entire process was successful.
I went through this yesterday. I have 25 Hue lights in total, and I had to add them one-by-one and manually select which room and automation they will be linked to. Not a huge problem, and luckily I have already named each of my Hue lights in such a way that it becomes obvious which room they are in based on the name of each light in the Hue app. This made the process much easier as it wasn't hard to figure out where "Kitchen Light 1" was located. Same with my Light switches.
Getting started with the whole process was rather confusing. Nothing was telling my how to do it. To get things started, I had to remove my existing Apple Home + Siri connection within the Hue app. Then instead of selecting Apple Home, I had to manually go deep into the menus to get the Matter key, and then move to the Apple Home app and add my Hue bridge to Apple Home using the Matter key. Rather confusing.
Getting started with the whole process was rather confusing. Nothing was telling my how to do it. To get things started, I had to remove my existing Apple Home + Siri connection within the Hue app. Then instead of selecting Apple Home, I had to manually go deep into the menus to get the Matter key, and then move to the Apple Home app and add my Hue bridge to Apple Home using the Matter key. Rather confusing.
it is moronic. hue app doesn't sync the room information and many item names are incorrect.
also when you make any changes in the home app, it is not reflected in hue. e.g. if you rename items in home, this information doesn't sync to hue.
for apple users with hue i doubt matter has any benefits other than philips saying they support matter standard. the communication takes place with hue bridge anyways. it just brought more bugs and incompatibility to my house. i'd actually be pleased if somebody could explain the technical aspects what matter brings.
also when you make any changes in the home app, it is not reflected in hue. e.g. if you rename items in home, this information doesn't sync to hue.
for apple users with hue i doubt matter has any benefits other than philips saying they support matter standard. the communication takes place with hue bridge anyways. it just brought more bugs and incompatibility to my house. i'd actually be pleased if somebody could explain the technical aspects what matter brings.
I decided to try the matter update since I don’t personally care about adaptive lighting anyways, but I'm having some issues with my lights. Sometimes when I change scenes, one or two of the lights (I have 8 in my basement) won’t change colors. So I have to repeat to Siri to change again, then all lights will be the correct color. Kind of frustrating.
Worst thing is, and maybe I’m missing something, I can’t seem to revert back to just HomeKit (non-matter) like it was before. Even if I scan the HomeKit code on the back of the hue bridge, it still sets up as matter.
Disappointed so far with matter support.
UPDATE: I’ve managed to find out how to revert back to HomeKit. I deleted the hue bridge from HomeKit, went to the hue app to make sure it was gone there as well, then in the home app I added an accessory and tapped more options. Initially the only thing that showed up was “hue bridge matter” but when I tapped the button “I don’t see my accessory”, I got the code from the back of my hue bridge and a second option for the bridge showed up. Sure enough it added it back as HomeKit instead of matter!
Worst thing is, and maybe I’m missing something, I can’t seem to revert back to just HomeKit (non-matter) like it was before. Even if I scan the HomeKit code on the back of the hue bridge, it still sets up as matter.
Disappointed so far with matter support.
UPDATE: I’ve managed to find out how to revert back to HomeKit. I deleted the hue bridge from HomeKit, went to the hue app to make sure it was gone there as well, then in the home app I added an accessory and tapped more options. Initially the only thing that showed up was “hue bridge matter” but when I tapped the button “I don’t see my accessory”, I got the code from the back of my hue bridge and a second option for the bridge showed up. Sure enough it added it back as HomeKit instead of matter!
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EDIT: Reached out to Hue through Facebook Messenger and they first had me install a pending update to the hub and then reboot modem, router and hub. Now it's all working fine. Still haven't switched to Matter because I don't want to have to delete and re-add everything, hopefully Hue can come up with a better way to migrate in the future.
None of our hue devices are responding this morning. Could be isolated but this is going to be a **** show if I have to re-add them all AND reconfigure every scene and automation.
Yes, they are all working fine in the Hue app.
None of our hue devices are responding this morning. Could be isolated but this is going to be a **** show if I have to re-add them all AND reconfigure every scene and automation.
Yes, they are all working fine in the Hue app.
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I don't understand why there isn't a rollback or backup feature of hue. you change something, it messes up everything. it is not possible to go back. worst is when i lose the scenes and colors and automations. it is so annoying to set them up again.
I've disabled auto updates for my bridge and bulbs. I have too many bulbs & accessories to dig through and this sounds like a nightmare.
The Hue app recently released an update that requires you accept their new terms of service. The new terms are approximately 30 pages long.
I really do not want to accept these new terms. They are so long, it is laughably offensive.
Does this new Matter update allow me to completely stop using the Hue app and only use the Apple Home app?
I really do not want to accept these new terms. They are so long, it is laughably offensive.
Does this new Matter update allow me to completely stop using the Hue app and only use the Apple Home app?
Thanks for the insight!
My existing Nanoleaf lights also run on Thread. Forgot to mention that. Could you compare a hub to having individual Thread products?
From my own experience moving to Thread based bulbs (I used to have wifi-only bulbs from another brand) the connection and responsiveness has been much better.
I switched over to Matter last night and it was a nightmare, so I ended up nuking my entire HomeKit setup and rebuilding it, and re-added Hue using HomeKit instead of Matter. It's absolute trash, avoid at all costs until its sorted out and works as well as going through HomeKit.
Specifically with Philips Hue, you will ALWAYS need the Hue App to sync the lights to the Bridge first and foremost.
Upgraded my two Hubs with 57 devices spread between them and I was very surprised by how well it went. Had zero issues and had everything back to how it was with HomeKit after about an hour or so.
Well done Philips.
Lights are faster to respond now and a plus is that the v1 dimmer switches now have short and long presses for each button in the Home app.
A tip, don’t remove the HomeKit Hue hub before adding the Matter version. Add the Matter one and only then remove the HomeKit one. This means all your rooms remain intact and it makes it all a bit easier to transition over.
Everything is working great and, for me at least, it has been a genuine improvement overall. Worth doing, even if you have a perfectly functioning HomeKit Hue setup currently.
Well done Philips.
Lights are faster to respond now and a plus is that the v1 dimmer switches now have short and long presses for each button in the Home app.
A tip, don’t remove the HomeKit Hue hub before adding the Matter version. Add the Matter one and only then remove the HomeKit one. This means all your rooms remain intact and it makes it all a bit easier to transition over.
Everything is working great and, for me at least, it has been a genuine improvement overall. Worth doing, even if you have a perfectly functioning HomeKit Hue setup currently.
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I may be wrong but I believe there were extra hoops you had to jump through when you had devices on more than one bridge. Does moving to MATTER help address that?
The only extra hoop was having to have two Hue accounts using separate email addresses. I was not able to add both Hue hubs to one account. Apart from that, all worked fine on both HomeKit and Matter for me.
All…I am having issues when trying to switch over to matter or I just don’t understand the steps. I removed my hub from home app. Then I went into the Hue app got the matter code. Went back to home app and tried to add a new accessory that wasn’t listed. I get an error message every time I try to do this approach. I then tried to add it to the hub that was available to setup in the home app and it says invalid code.
Thoughts?
Thoughts?
This became slight more complicated than I wanted as there no way to migrate to Matter without creating a Hue account. And now I can’t re-enable HomeKit integration without creating the Hue account…
I’m not as familiar with Thread but from my understanding it operates on the same bands as Zigbee and therefore doesn’t compete with WiFi. The big difference is that while Zigbee is centralized to a hub Thread operates as a mesh network, which helps improve reliability by reducing the chance of there being a single point of failure.
That's not Matter specific, I think. I didn't update anything and depending on the type and amount, the lights don't change at the same time. On iOS16 they did turn on or off almost at the same time, but changing colour often is done one by one. Sometimes quick, sometimes a bit slow.
Actually, on iOS17 (HomePod) I told Siri the other day to change the "lightS" (plural) to a specific level and ALL the lights in the house did change one by one. When I said "light" it changed only the lights in the room. One day later I did the same and Siri made no difference between "light" and "lights" , it only set the lights in the room. Strange.
One note: I did not upgrade to HomeKit's new architecture either. Maybe that is a factor too.
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ZigBee, Thread and wifi operate within the same 2.4GHz frequency band and certainly can interfere with each other.
Also both ZigBee and Thread do create a mesh network, with all the correction/retransmit mechanisms to compensate for all interferences as much as possible. Due to this they all can coexist without much trouble.
The differences between ZigBee and Thread are that ZigBee (as used by HUE and IKEA) operates on a fixed channel (user selectable), whereas Thread uses frequency-hopping to adapt to the conditions in the frequency band per device. Also the Thread specification allows the use of extra frequency bands 868 and 915 MHz. Not all Thread devices are capable of using this lower band though. Apple's Thread devices for example don't (according to FCC documentation).
ZigBee has only one hub per network (current version in use), but depending on the ZigBee device it does not necessarily uses a hub to do its thing. HUE does everything through the hub, whereas IKEA lights and switches communicate directly to each other. When the IKEA hub goes offline most lights and switch still keep on working. When a hub fails with HUE devices, all devices become uncontrollable.
In my experience both ZigBee and Thread are very resilient, but Thread clearly more. Noticeable at greater distances (>15 meters). I got this Eve Energy in my garage >15 meters away that connects perfectly to several Thread nodes in my house, whereas on the same spot a HUE motion sensor has trouble keeping connected due to neighbouring wifi. Connecting to my own Wifi on that spot is impossible, again due to the neighbouring wifi.
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I’ve managed to find out how to revert back to HomeKit. I deleted the hue bridge from HomeKit, went to the hue app to make sure it was gone there as well, then in the home app I added an accessory and tapped more options. Initially only thing that showed up was “hue bridge matter” but when I tapped the button “I don’t see my accessory”, I got the code from the back of my hue bridge and a second option for the bridge showed up. Sure enough it added it back as HomeKit instead of matter!