Nanoleaf Thread smart light system review

But, well, I think we and perhaps Nanoleaf jumped the gun, though of course someone has to be first.

Right now, Matter doesn’t just fail to make things easier and better. If my experience yesterday is anything to go by, it makes things harder and worse.

And the failure of Matter to live up to its promise, at least in these early days of the standard, doesn’t appear to be a problem limited to Nanoleaf.

Apple, Google and Samsung, three of the biggest manufacturers backing the Matter standard, all failed me yesterday, as may have our favourite smart-home automation platform, Home Assistant.

(Though, when mixing-and-matching fails, when devices and platforms refuse to get along as they’re supposed to, it can be hard to tell where the failure actually lies.)

My 12 hours of hell actually started very promisingly.

The moment I plugged in the Nanoleaf smart bulb, up popped the Smart Things app on my Samsung phone, telling me it had detected a Matter device and offering to install it, either on Samsung’s Matter-enabled Smart Things platform or some other Matter platform of my choosing.

That was the key promise of Matter being delivered right from the very first moment!

In the bad old days of smart devices, if you wanted, say, to use a Nanoleaf light with Google Assistant, you’d have set it up in the Nanoleaf app, then switched to the Google Home app, where you’d be given Google access to your Nanoleaf account, so Google Home could control the lights when you spoke to Google Assistant.

It’s a horrible, horrible system that makes it hard to set things up, hard to maintain and breaks time and again.

But this pop-up was telling me a) I didn’t need the Nanoleaf app at all and b) regardless of what app I used for setup, I could share control of the device with other platforms, which themselves would be able to use the device without reference to some other account or plugin.

Alas, it didn’t work. Despite detecting that a Matter device had been turned on, Samsung Smart Things was ultimately unable to connect to the Nanoleaf Smart Bulb and set it up for me.

Indeed, in 12 hours of trying to connect the lights to the Matter systems on our Apple Home, Google Home, Samsung Smart Things and Home Assistant platforms, trying as many things as one can try in 12 hours, only a couple of things worked.

At one stage I was able to get the Nanoleaf light strip to connect to the Matter hub built into the Samsung OLED TV we reviewed last week, but then, when the Samsung app kindly offered to share the lights with Google Home and/or Home Assistant, that sharing failed.

It’s worth noting that Smart Things never offered to share the Nanoleaf light with our Apple Home system, which supposedly supports Matter. Not only does the interoperability promise of Matter appear to be broken, it also appears to be incomplete.

Unable to share the Nanoleaf light strip from Samsung Smart Things to Google Home, I then factory reset it and, on about the fourth or fifth reset, was able to install it directly in Google Home, which likewise lets you share devices with other (non-Apple) Matter platforms.

But, just as it did when trying to share to Google Home, it failed to share from Google Home.

Oh, I could go on and on about the troubles I had with the Nanoleaf Matter lightbulbs, some of which can be sheeted home to Nanoleaf itself but most of which appear to be related to the Matter standard either not being ready, or not having been implemented consistently, which amounts to the same thing.

The main trouble I had with the lights themselves is one that has plagued Nanoleaf for years, ever since it introduced the “Thread” wireless system that is now part of the Matter standard.

You can think of Thread as like Wi-Fi, except it’s supposed to use less electricity and, more importantly, it’s not supposed to drop the connection between your smart devices and your home network as Wi-Fi often does.

The trouble we’ve had with Nanoleaf’s Thread devices, though, is they keep falling off their Thread network, and reverting to their fallback Bluetooth connectivity – even when they’re only metres from a Thread router.

In yesterday’s trials and tribulations, that meant they stopped working in Matter altogether, and continued to work only from inside the Nanoleaf app itself.

I tried to force the Nanoleaf lights to only use Thread by installing them with the Smart Things app (which I don’t think supports Bluetooth, though after 12 hours of spinning around in circles I’m not sure of anything any more), but when I did that the Smart Things app insisted I enter a mysterious “32-character network key” before proceeding, only to fail once I found the key (back in the Nanoleaf app).

None of this is to say Matter doesn’t or won’t matter, of course.

It’s the one bet the electronics industry has made on cleaning up the awful mess made by the proliferation of smart devices. There’s too much riding on it for it to fail.

Hopefully, in six or 12 months, we’ll be able to look back at yesterday’s fiasco, and giggle.