Ikea overhauls its smart home with new Matter-ready hub and app

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Ikea has a new hub and app that could end its smart home issues. After a month of leaks, Ikea's new Dirigera hub is now official and will be accompanied by an entirely new Ikea Home Smart app. The hub and the new app are not due to arrive until October.

The new smart home standard that Matter is supposed to launch around the same time as it does is a promise to make connected devices more interoperability, flexible, and private, no matter if you purchased them from Apple, Amazon, or any other company.

Ikea showed me the new hub and app working together in a real-time demonstration ahead of today's announcement. Several devices were added in Ikea-speak without a hiccup. It looked intuitive and reliable, two words that most people wouldn't associate with the company's current products.

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

The on-boarding process for connecting new smart products to the smart home has been strengthened with Dirigera and the new app.

The name of the new hub is Dirigera. conducting in Swedish is what it means. Ikea calls it a hub, to differentiate it from the other white puck-shaped gateway.

Background

Ikea tells us that the old gateway that is being replaced was first introduced in 2014; it was just a hobby and still focused on the lighting division. It was odd that you had to add their steering device first before adding the lightbulbs.

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

Home Smart became a strategic business area in the middle of the year under Block's leadership, putting it alongside traditional business areas like Living Room, Bedroom, and Textiles in terms of importance to the company. Block's hobby was embraced by Ikea with a budget to match his ambitions.

The team has gained insights over the last eight years into the Home Smart business area. It was built from the ground up to support Ikea Home Smart, covering lighting, blinds, sound, and air purification, as well as what's still to come. I was given a preview of the work at the end of the year. It made its way into the Home Smart app and the firmware for the gateway, which helped improve the user experience. The body can only do so much if it has good bones.

The company is fond of repeating this and has been ramping up their in-house software expertise to match Ikea's skill at making furnishings for many people.

In the last two years, we have accelerated tremendously. We have invested a lot in digital competence, hiring in every field from software development to data management and data privacy. The coworkers who are digital specialists have a lot to teach our life-at- home experts.

Block thinks that everything is in place for mass adoption of Ikea 2.0. It's a massive undertaking, but also the greatest opportunity in order for Ikea to retain leadership in life at home.

Ikea will continue to do living rooms and kitchens and everything we expect from the company, if Block and Töreman have their way. That means more integrations like speakers built into lamps, bookshelves, and wall art, wireless charging built into desktop lamps, and air purifiers baked into side tables, and whatever else the home-obsessed nerds at Ikea can dream up.

I might not call it a smart home because it is just home.

The Matter-ready Dirigera hub

The new Dirigera hub is about half as tall and half as wide as the old one, measuring 4.5 cm high and 11 cm wide. The new hub has a power supply and a port for connecting to the internet.

Ikea calls the hub Matter-ready since it is not officially certified. The first batches of official Matter-certified devices are expected before the end of the year, but it is not certain if the Dirigera hub will be certified in time. The Dirigera hub and Home Smart app will support Ikea's Home Smart products when it is certified. There are scenes within the app where those devices can be controlled.

Image: Ikea

Once everything is switched on, the Dirigera hub can act as a Thread border router, thanks to the radios inside. The primary protocol used by Matter is Thread, and a border router is a bridge between a Thread network and a wi-fi network. After the October launch, the Dirigera hub will be updated with an option to connect to your home internet routers over 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, as well as an Ethernet cable, which will be the only option on the first day.

The interoperability in smart homes and between smart products will be strengthened by this.

Ikea won't provide a list of which of its many smart products will support Matter. It's unclear if that means it will be compatible in the future. Ikea is trying to make sure their smart products can be used on a competitor's platform. It could also mean Home Smart integrations with other companies.

Matter doesn't cover all smart home devices yet. The current list includes plugs, bulbs, switches, door locks, thermostats, blinds, sensors, garage door controllers, wireless access points and bridges. Ikea's low-priced Symfonisk series of speakers aren't part of the discussion yet. It is a positive sign that Sonos joined the CSA that oversees Matter.

Image: Ikea

Ikea plans to launch away-from- home remote access in the first half of the next decade. The only way to access your Ikea devices outside the home is by connecting your Ikea gateway with a smart home network. Ikea will be developing its own cloud network to handle remote access.

The gateway won't be updated to support Matter when the new app comes in October. The current gateway and Home Smart app will continue to receive security updates and patches for at least three years.

All Ikea Home Smart devices will not be upgraded, but will be migrated over to the Dirigera hub when it launches in October. The final price for the Dirigera hub is still unknown, but it will be more expensive than the dfri gateway.

On with the show

Ikea gave The Verge a few demos of the Dirigera hub and new app. They were recorded in her home. We are looking at prerelease software, so things might change by the time the hub and app ship.

Setting up a new hub doesn't use theQR code used in the past, but instead has an action button that must be pressed during discovery. The new app organizes devices around rooms, not groups of smart devices attached to steering devices. You can add controllers and smart devices to those rooms to interact with scenes.

The video above shows custom icons and colors for rooms. Ikea will continue to offer a section for managed devices to sort the home by things like lights and blinds.

The new app shows the steps the user must take to add new devices if they click on them. The pace that actions must be taken to remove any guesswork from the process of resetting devices is shown. Product animations now feature rich illustrations to depict things like blind height and bulb brightness in order to help users fine-tune scenes in order to create the desired atmosphere.

Ikea isn't abandoning its four-interface approach to its Home Smart ecosystem: the app, smart shortcut buttons, remotes, and voice control.

Ikea Home Smart app and Dirigera seem to be on the right path. It's a good balance to cater to first time smart device owners without slowing down the process for experts who already own a lot of Ikea devices. We won't know for sure until we get our hands on a review device and new app to see how they work with existing Ikea Home Smart devices.

For anyone who has ever been frustrated by Ikea's gateway, now at least you have a rough plan to plan your angst around.