Philips Hue bulbs are getting more compatible with your diverse smart home hardware

Philips Hue bulbs are getting a little more flexible. Starting later this year, updates to select Hue lights will enable them to work over both Zigbee and Matter over Thread simultaneously.

Connecting over Matter is already an option for some Hue lights, but as of today, opting to use the open standard disables Zigbee connectivity. Hue parent company Signify has announced that bulbs with built-in Matter support will be updated to allow for using both connectivity standards concurrently, and future releases will be built to support both out of the box.

While the official Hue Bridge connects to bulbs over Zigbee, Matter over Thread is supported by a wide range of smart home hubs and ecosystems. Today, setting compatible Hue bulbs up using Matter over Thread disables Zigbee access, making it difficult to move between the two standards — if you set a bulb up on the Hue Bridge, you’d have to reset it to connect it to a Matter setup, and vice versa.

Signify’s announcement says that the update will be available for its lights that use Silicon Labs’ MG26 and SiMG301 chips — presumably all of those that come with Matter support. Hueblog says that the lineup that’ll eventually get the update includes Hue’s current-gen standard E27 bulbs, among others.

Simultaneous access to both Matter and Zigbee connections might not matter much for most users on a day-to-day basis (Hue lights set up over Zigbee are already accessible inside Google Home via a back-end integration), but it’ll make moving an entire collection of Hue lights between ecosystems simpler.