Here’s why it’s not working yet

The company’s new line of affordable gadgets was supposed to prove Matter’s promise.

Instead, it exposed just how far interoperability still has to go.

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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 ).

Problems at the heart of the Matter
“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.”
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.

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.

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.

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
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.

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.

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.

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