At the beginning of November 2022, the new smart home standard Matter is officially launched. Philips Hue is also one of the supporters of the new standard and announced at the launch: “The software update will be part of the regular updates for the Philips Hue Bridge and is expected to be available to all users in the first quarter of 2023.”
The first quarter is already over in a few days, but the Matter update for the Hue Bridge has not yet been released. Reason enough to ask the manufacturer from the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the current status is not very promising:
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 doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen in the next few weeks. In any case, the launch of Matter has been very slow so far – and I recommend that all those interested simply exercise a little patience. We’re probably not talking about weeks here, but rather months.
What are the benefits of Matter for Philips Hue?
“The update will make it even easier to network Philips Hue products with smart Matter-compatible products and apps from other suppliers. In doing so, Matter creates a reliable and extremely secure connection between the different products. The cross-brand connection will be easier than ever before,” Philips Hue informs us.
But that is not all. It is also the small details that will make the difference. 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. In addition, when the other manufacturers are ready, it should be possible to connect more than one Hue Bridge with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. Likewise, third-party products can also be used with HomeKit after the Matter update.
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