It wasn’t all that long ago that putting together a smart home meant dealing with multiple hubs and an often-conflicting mess of protocols and apps. However, Matter, a common communication standard for smart home gadgets, was released in 2022 to help address that, allowing smart home products to communicate as a unified system. Thankfully, it has largely delivered on that promise, and the latest example is with Samsung confirming its SmartThings platform works with IKEA’s new set of smart home devices.
“Samsung has enabled seamless integration of IKEA’s twenty-five practical Matter-over-Thread smart home devices — including smart bulbs and plugs — into the SmartThings platform, allowing users to effortlessly incorporate them into daily life,” Samsung said in its blog post.
That shouldn’t be too surprising since the promise of Matter is that it just works with supported devices as long as you have a Thread (the mesh networking protocol Matter uses) border router. Still, it’s good to have confirmation that you can add your SmartThings hub to the list of platforms that will work with these devices. Others include Google Home, Apple HomeKit and Amazon’s Alexa.
As for IKEA’s smart gadgets themselves, they’ve been widely praised for their affordability, aesthetics and genuinely useful features. Our own Amy Skorheim recently outfitted her entire guest room with IKEA smart home devices and came away impressed with the look of the bulbs and the convenience of the remotes. And as her testing confirmed, the fact that they can work with other Matter smart home gadgets such as your Apple TV, SmartThings Hub, Google Nest Hub or Amazon Echo acting as a hub makes buying into Matter-compatible devices a safer bet than ever, regardless of the manufacturer.
As for Samsung, it says it’s working to support new features for IKEA’s scroll wheel remote. It already works for adjusting the color temperature and brightness of lighting, but Samsung plans to roll out support for adjusting blinds in the future.
