Ikea’s Matter woes spotlight smart home’s biggest headache

So there you are, with that new smart gadget you snapped up on Amazon, and you’re ready to add it to your smart home. Maybe your new device even works with Matter, the new smart home standard designed to make Alexa, Apple Home, and Google Home play nice together. What could go wrong? 

Plenty, as it turns out. “Unable to connect,” your smart home app complains, even as after you’ve painstakingly followed all the pairing steps—you know, like pressing and holding a button until an LED flashes, scanning a QR code with your phone, pinpointing an exact model number in a manufacturer’s app, and so on. 

Smart home connection hiccups are in the news right now thanks to Ikea and its new line of Matter devices, with many users complaining they’re having trouble keeping the devices online or the devices are failing to pair to their Matter smart home hubs entirely. 

Ikea has acknowledged the problem, telling The Verge that while its new Matter devices “work seamlessly” for “most customers,” they are “aware that some customers are experiencing connection issues when setting up their devices in certain home environments.” The company has reached out to the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the group behind the Matter standard, to “better understand the issues and improve the experience.” 

Ikea

While Ikea is coming under scrutiny for its recent Matter woes, it’s not the first time a smart home user has dealt with a device that flat-out refused to connect. Has it happened to me? Oh, sure—many times. 

There was the smart plug that absolutely, positively refused to stay connected. I had a terrible time getting it to pair in the first place, and then it would connect—but a day or so later, that damnable “unresponsive” tag would appear in the Apple Home app, warning me that the plug had yet again dropped the connection. I fought with that smart plug for months, until the day when—without explanation—it stopped trolling me, and it’s been working flawlessly ever since. 

I’ve also dealt with flaky smart lights, unresponsive Bluetooth speakers, stubborn security cameras, you name it. And when you go to the manufacturer for help, they always start with the same assumption: It’s your fault. 

Even Ikea’s statement—with the whole “connection issues…in certain home environments” thing—sets off faint alarm bells in my head, reminding me of all the times when the cable company blamed an internet outage on my Wi-Fi router. 

The truth is that no matter how seamless they say it is, smart home and wireless connectivity is an incredibly complex process, where devices must find and recognize each other, authenticate, and then maintain their connections over lengthy periods of time. It gets even more complicated when it comes to battery-powered devices that periodically go to sleep to conserve energy. 

So pinpointing the reason that, say, your new Ikea smart button can’t connect to your Matter hub can be frustrating bordering on impossible, and I understand the impulse to give up rather than submit to a grilling from tech support about your Wi-Fi setup, or whether there’s a microwave oven in the house.

Now, I am an Ikea fan, and I’m inclined believe the company when it says it takes the complaints about its new Matter devices “very seriously.” I also hope Ikea is open to possibility that we’re not the ones doing it wrong. 

This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart dimmer switches and buttons.