IKEA's Trådfri smart lighting system is now officially compatible with HomeKit, Apple's smart home management platform.
The support was confirmed in IKEA's response to a question posted on its Facebook page this morning, after a customer noticed a change in the technical specifications on the company's Trådfri product page.
According to a thread in the Philips Hue developer support forum, IKEA's smart lighting bulbs are now also compatible with the Philips Hue Bridge, once the products' software has been manually updated.
Existing Trådfri gateway owners need to ensure they have the latest firmware upgrade for their devices to pair them with Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, or Google Home.
IKEA had promised HomeKit support for its affordable range of home lighting products back in May. The system was originally announced in late March, and includes LED bulbs, illuminated panels, a motion sensor kit, a gateway kit, and dimming lights.
Update: Sadly, it looks as if IKEA's confirmation of Trådfri HomeKit support earlier today was in error. IKEA has since made the following statement on its Swedish Facebook page:
There has been information going out today about the compatibility of TRÅDFRI. We can now inform you that TRÅDFRI is not yet compatible with Apple, Amazon and Google. The plan is that everything will work as we'd like this fall. We are very sorry for the confusion!
Note: This does not apply to the Philips Hue Bridge compatibility, as reported from the separate source above.
Top Rated Comments
This move by ikea could potentially be massive.
(UPDATE): Ikea is now saying their gateway/hub will be updated in the Fall, but their bulbs do work as of right now with Hue and it's HomeKit compatible hub after applying the newly available update).
Ok, so the downside is that you need a computer to run HomeBridge for you, but you can either install it on a Mac or if you have a raspberry Pi that is the cheapest option ( I think you can buy a rPi zero for under 10 pounds ).
So you install HomeBridge, then install the 'Ikea' plugin and that's all you need to do, the Ikea plugin will automatically find the Ikea Wireless Hub and then send all your bulbs/panels to HomeKit and they just appear like any other bulbs, you can turn them on or off, change the brightness, or the colour, and use Siri to control them.
I've been using this for a few weeks, I've got 5 Ikea bulbs and 2 Ikea panels connected, and another advantage of the HomeBridge software is that it works with other IoT appliances not just Ikea.
So I've also got 3 TP-Link wireless plug sockets, they are very cheap because they are not HomeKit compatible, but with the HomeBridge plugin I can also control them using Siri via HomeKit.
I'll definitely switch over to the Ikea HomeKit solution though once their new firmware is released, but for now, you can go 100% HomeKit and Siri activated with all your Tradfi appliances today :)
LIFX instead promised HomeKit for ages and users are still waiting for an ETA. Come on, LIFX, wake up!