@ff00aa yeah HA is a lot tbh. It took me a long time to give it a proper chance and I still don’t really love it (user experience is just not a thing there at all and just recently they replaced my home dashboard with something completely different that I am not even gonna try touching), but it’s by far the most reliable and fastest hub ever so I have all my zigbee stuff running on that and then brought into other systems from there.

@ff00aa ah yeah that way you’re still depending on Apple’s crapware, the way to go seems to be running Thread firmware on one of Zigbee usb dongles compatible with HA and pairing directly to that. Btw it’s really not obvious at all but all of the new Ikea stuff is dual-protocol for backwards compatibility, so you could’ve paired them via Zigbee. You need to power cycle them 12 times to switch to Zigbee pairing mode, it should pulse cold white instead of warm white if done correctly.

@ff00aa wait did you try Matter over Thread in Apple Home directly or via HomeAssistant? Because it’s definitely a nightmare to setup in Apple Home since pairing has been getting more and more broken for years, but once everything is setup (I managed to pair 80+ of the new Ikea devices on my old iPad running iOS 17, none of the new devices with 26 were able to pair more than a few without needing restarting) it’s not any worse than the old HAP stuff in any way 😅

@christianselig laziness + hope that it will get better with more/newer devices/firmware updates 😬 but yeah will probably eventually do that as HomeKit is complete abandonware at this point.

@christianselig well to be fair my Matter over Thread devices are all ran via HomeKit so that’s likely the source of most if not all issues. I haven’t had a single unresponsive accessorry ever on my HA-ran zigbee network. Both networks have between 80-90 devices and the mesh was designed with a lot of thought (I was basically designing my house around the accessories I was gonna use).

@christianselig do you have room behind your switches for smart relays? I use the Sonoff mini zigbee one behind my dumb switches setup as a detached relay (so it never actually cuts power to the smart lights), then automations toggle the smart light when the dumb switch toggles the relay. If the lights are also ZigBee-based and you have HA running your automations, it’s 100% bullet-proof as long as your mesh is healthy. I wish Thread was as good.