Ikea’s new Matter-over-Thread products were supposed to prove that the smart home could be cheap, accessible, and reliable. The highly anticipated line — which includes sensors, remotes, smart plugs, air-quality monitors, and smart bulbs — has most everything you need to build a smart home, with prices starting at $6. It’s an exciting idea, but it’s still not ready for primetime.

When I first got the Ikea devices in January, I had a lot of problems connecting them to my main platform, Apple Home. And it turned out I was not alone. Reddit forums and user reviews were full of reports of onboarding and connectivity issues. Many people were struggling to get devices connected to every smart home platform — from Apple Home to Google Home, and even Ikea’s own Dirigera hub. YouTuber Shane Whatley documented his experience trying to onboard to Apple Home in real time, and it’s fairly painful to watch.

While I waited for Ikea to figure out what was up, I tried some more creative troubleshooting in my home. The only (admittedly odd) fix I found was to force Apple Home not to use my main Home Hub, an Ethernet-connected Apple TV. Instead, I told it to use a HomePod, and was able to onboard an Ikea Bilresa button and a Grillplats smart plug that had repeatedly failed to connect. (Hat tip to Whatley for this idea.)

Why Apple would prefer I not use my high-powered, hardwired Home Hub is anyone’s guess. In any case, it didn’t last long. When I tried to add a Myggspray motion sensor as well, it failed. I then tried connecting the same Myggspray to Google Home using an Android phone, and it joined on the first try. Admittedly, I have a complicated network, but this points towards Apple causing issues, not my setup.

While Ikea said that “the products work seamlessly” for most customers, it did acknowledge the problems “some users” were experiencing. It published a troubleshooting page, and online forums quickly filled with advice on getting the gadgets connected. These range from simple “restart your phone” to the inexplicable “just leave it alone for a few days, and then it will work” to the more complicated “dive into your internet router’s network settings and enable IPv6” (Thread and Matter run over IPv6).

One intrepid smart home reviewer, A Smarter House, painstakingly combed through all the proposed fixes and tried as many as he could on as many platforms as possible. This excellent deep dive by the YouTuber and blogger goes through the issues and what he tried that worked. His conclusion: There is not a single problem, but multiple, and the problems differ depending on the platform you are using.

Over the last few weeks, Ikea has rolled out several updates to its Dirigera hub to improve Matter-over-Thread stability and updated the troubleshooting page with more potential fixes. Ikea initially pointed to “users’ varying and sometimes complicated home networking setups,” something that’s difficult to replicate in a lab. And sure, individual network setups are often problematic. But the widespread nature of the issues points to something bigger: a problem with the core promise of Matter.

Problems at the heart of the Matter

With Matter came the promise of compatibility with every ecosystem, from Apple Home and Amazon Alexa to Home Assistant and Google Home. The industry was watching Ikea’s rollout closely; it was the first time Matter devices had been tested at the scale the standard was designed for — inexpensive devices for lots of people that would just work.

But what has become clear since Matter’s enthusiastic launch is that Apple, Google, and Amazon are now fully focused on pursuing their own agendas. The cooperative spirit that defined the standard’s early development has stalled, and it’s every platform for itself in the race for users.

Matter is an interoperability standard, but interoperability with Matter devices is still largely elusive. Rather than being a plug-and-play solution for manufacturers — make a Matter device, and it will just work with any platform — there remains a huge onus on each manufacturer to ensure its devices work properly with each platform before release. Which is basically the same problem they had before Matter launched.

Only now manufacturers have a playbook to follow that supposedly makes their devices work with everyone — easy, right? Apparently not. My theory is that it’s how the platforms interact with the devices that is causing many of these problems — something manufacturers have no control over.

This was implicitly confirmed by Thread Group, the organization that runs the Thread protocol, when I asked for comment on the issues users were seeing with Ikea’s Matter devices. “A seamless onboarding experience relies on orchestrating multiple components and layers within the smart home ecosystem, including the mobile app, application protocol, network protocol, platform software, and hardware design,” Ann Olivo, VP of marketing for Thread Group, told me via email. “While Thread provides a robust and secure foundation at the network layer, optimizing the end-to-end experience requires ongoing collaboration across all these interconnected components.”

That’s not to say Thread is blameless here. The protocol is frustratingly obtuse, and there are still too few troubleshooting solutions. Thread Border Routers remain a major pain point. Having too many, not enough, or the wrong ones can cause onboarding and connectivity issues. That last one is down to the problem of multiple TBRs from different companies still not working together. In practice, this means many homes now have several Thread Border Routers — Apple TVs, Eero routers, Echos, Google TV Streamers — that don’t always cooperate.

Additionally, Ikea may have shot itself in the foot by releasing its line of smart bulbs weeks after the remotes and sensors (they’re still not widely available). The latter are battery-powered, the former mains-powered. Thread is a low-power mesh network that relies on mains-powered repeaters to route signals. If you bought battery-powered buttons and sensors but have no mains-powered devices, that could be why you’ve seen devices drop off the network.

What is Ikea doing about it?

In 2024, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (the organization behind Matter) had to set up an interoperability lab to help manufacturers test their devices across all platforms. Whether Ikea took advantage of this or just took the promise of platform interoperability at face value isn’t clear. But either way, it now has a big mess to clean up.

The company is scrambling to improve reliability through software updates to its Dirigera hub, focused on improving Thread network performance and Matter onboarding stability. These include optimizing network communication and implementing “better cleanup of network settings after configuration changes, and fixes for connectivity disruptions that could cause device onboarding to fail,” according to David Granath, range manager at Ikea, who is leading the development of its smart home products. “In addition, we had an issue where outdated IPv6 network addresses could linger after configuration changes, such as turning IPv6 off on the WiFi router.”

You don’t need Ikea’s hub or app to onboard Matter devices — you should be able to just use your platform’s app. But the new Thread reset function in Ikea’s Home Smart app, which the company says “helps to rebuild the local Thread mesh if devices or border routers have fallen out of sync,” did help with some of my issues. Additionally, a Thread network check tool (iOS only) that shows your Thread network and which border routers are part of it is also useful. (There are a few other apps that offer this, too.)

Over the last week, I worked with Ikea and these new tools to troubleshoot my setup, and tried resetting and re-adding several devices, along with a new Bilresa button Ikea sent.

I got the new button connected to Apple Home on the first try, and yes — I cheered. I was also finally able to add the Timmerflotte temperature sensor to the Dirigera hub, and I had my first successful attempt at using Ikea devices with multi-admin (which lets you share devices across platforms), adding the Grillplats smart plug from Apple Home into Google Home.

However, an existing Kajplats lightbulb and Myggspray motion sensor still wouldn’t connect to Apple Home — giving me the now familiar “Unable to Add Accessory: Operation timed out” alert after about three minutes of trying to connect. But I was able to set up both of those in Google Home.

Ikea’s efforts may have improved things, but connecting devices still remains hit or miss. Even if it resolves the problems — and it looks like it’s moving in the right direction — Ikea’s stumble reveals a fundamental problem with Matter’s promise that you can build a device once and trust the platforms to handle the rest.

Until the major players prioritize interoperability, every manufacturer risks ending up where Ikea is now, scrambling for solutions in a sea of problems. Users who don’t turn to places like Reddit and YouTube for help will simply return their gadgets and move on. And the smart home will remain stuck in the early-adopter phase that Matter was supposed to leave behind.

While it’s clear there are ways to onboard these devices and keep them connected, the current experience is poor — not because any one company is failing, but because all of them are. And that’s not good news for Matter. Ultimately, what or who is at fault isn’t really the point; the point is that Matter promised it would just work, and it just doesn’t.