Philips Hue Bridge Matter Support Update Now Available

Beta user for the past 6 months here. Migration from traditional, Home based to Matter/Thread based is a pain. You basically remove your existing bridge, then re-add it in the new standard. All your customizations will be gone. And so a lot of automations too: not all features are supported by Matter at this time. Unless you only have lights, sure, give it a try. For more complex, moving parts involving sensors and switches, be prepared to redo everything and discover what will and will not work while resetting.

I just set it up and wanted to add my perspective as the general sense in this thread is that it messes things up. Not for me.

It was great!



After adding the bridge to the Home app, it went through all of my lights in an easy to understand flow, with an Identify button so I knew which one it was asking about, and asked to confirm the room, the light’s name and reviewed the automations that were setup.



This enabled me to harmonize the names of my hue lights which Hue never updated when I changed them in the Home app over the past few years. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time and the Home app walk through made it painless.

It also found my Hue Taps, Dials and sensors and added them all into the Home app. I no longer need the Hue app at all.



I have about 25 Hue lights and accessories and this took me under 10 minutes to walk around and confirm. Would’ve been ever faster if I trusted Hue to have updated changes I made in the Home app which it didn’t. In the end, I have a much cleaner setup that I can oversee entirely in the Home app. So glad I went ahead and did this.

What are the advantages to Matter?

Mesh network resilience. If you’ve been using Hue for more than a few years, you’ll recall the network related issues we’ve endured for over a decade. Delays or no response are one of the most frustrating parts of smart homes when you just want your light to work as if you were flicking a physical switch.

This happens because all the data traffic goes through your Internet router. A bad setup or a busy network could mess up your lights’ response. One minute everything is working fine, the next none of your lights respond while you’re there waiting in the dark.

HomeKit 2.0 appears to have addressed this primarily by keeping the current status of every light locally on every device that controls them like your Apple TV, HomePods, iPhone, iPad and Mac so that doesn’t have to be fetched from the light before issuing a command, avoiding that two way trip.

That said, if you have a janky router or internet or if the router is offline for whatever reason, then your light simply won’t work. Matter solves that.

Having the Hue hub on Matter means that it becomes a part of a mesh network, independent of your internet router. The Hue hub connects directly to Matter controllers like Apple TV and HomePods in your home, and self heals if one of them goes offline. Any of them, usually the closest with the strongest connection, can control a Matter hub directly, with no internet or router necessary.

So even if you use HomeKit where things have gotten more reliable in the last year, you’ll benefit from your Hue hub being on Matter. I imagine that a Threads enabled hub will be coming or better, that Hue will start incorporating Thread into lights directly so that eventually no hub is needed at all. For me, I’m only buying Threads lights going forward, Philips or not.

I’m not even sure what the Bridge does. It’s so light, feels like it’s empty. Why didn’t they just build the bridge into the bulbs?

It translates between wifi to zigbee, and runs their scheduling scripts etc.

If every bulb had it built in, they'd be wasting a lot of power relatively speaking.

Beta user for the past 6 months here. Migration from traditional, Home based to Matter/Thread based is a pain. You basically remove your existing bridge, then re-add it in the new standard. All your customizations will be gone. And so a lot of automations too: not all features are supported by Matter at this time. Unless you only have lights, sure, give it a try. For more complex, moving parts involving sensors and switches, be prepared to redo everything and discover what will and will not work while resetting.

Thanks for the warning.

NameDrop should work cross-platform like Matter accessories will. Apple would do well to work with Google to sort this out.