I’m a big fan of Inovelli’s White Series Matter over Thread switches. I currently have five of these switches installed in my home and plan to add more to expand my smart home setup. I’d love a news update on the following topics, consolidated into one post for convenience:
How is testing progressing with the upcoming Apple homeOS and iOS 19? Any insights on compatibility or performance?
Are you hopeful that new Matter features will be implemented with homeOS and iOS 19 to enhance smart home functionality?
How is the White Series Smart On/Off Switch with Humidity Sensing coming along? Is it close to release?
Are there any new Matter over Thread products on the horizon from Inovelli?
Are tariffs still impacting production or pricing for these switches?
When do you expect more Inovelli White Dimmer Switches to be back in stock?
Please share any official updates or links to recent announcements from Inovelli!
I’m going to Hijack your thread a little and add Google Home information.
I have 15 dimmer Inovelli White matter/Thread switches, and Google Home turns the light on and off quickly and locally… but:
2 simultaneous Google Thread border routers caused many google-reboot-required disconnects for me. Switches disappeared and failed to come back online once a month. This is a Google Home bug, as 1 Google Home device was fine.
Matter DOES support multi-endpoint devices (like Inovelli’s Dimmer switches), but Google Home’s UI doesn’t surface this cleanly.
All indications Google Home has no interest in improving their Matter implementation. They have a partner program, Home APIs, where device makers can override or supplement Matter behavior through cloud-to-cloud integrations using the Home APIs… and it really feels like they have no intention of improving the overall Matter implementation anytime soon.
I bought a n100 intel device, built a HAOS Server, shared switches back to Google Assistant, and am currently using Google’s Thread radios until I buy a dongle ( I want the thread border router away from my kids, Marty). Works great.
I WILL be buying the ON/OFF switches when they come out to finish my smart home setup, and possibly a couple fan devices. Notification lights are quite useful, as well as the config button and multi-tap automations.
I hope the preorder for the ON/OFF switches occur soon.
I use Home Assistant also. I have AppleTVs and HomePods which act as my Border Routers. They act as Thread to Ethernet gateways and allow me to have multiple Border Routers (as opposed to being reliant on a dongle plugged into my HA in the basement). This seems to work well for me.
Scan home-assistant-matter-hub QR code with Google Home to allow Google Home to control Home Assistant devices. I created a bridge before activating IPV6 on the new router, and had to recreate the bridge.
I was wrong about the “2 Google border router instability”, it was partly my terrible router with poor support for mDNS / multicast / interface bridging (now replaced), and partly poor manual HA Google Assistant cloud integration (Long cloud delays can make the app buttons deactivate, which would happen in peak when they seemingly throttle free users).
The Matter hub addon allows me to share only devices that Google Home needs to see, so no more clutter. It also avoids Matter/thread multi-admin instability and HA Google Assistant Integration instability. The Google cloud lag is gone when using Google Assistant or Google Home App (I can flicker the light quickly on the Google Home app and Google doesn’t lose track of state).
The issues I had to work around were evolving technology issues, and I suspect the issues will disappear with time.. Therefore I surmise the State of Inovelli Matter/Thread switches is Good.
@Ted I appreciate your post above. I’m not 100% sure which parts of your solution impact the disconnects. I have a similar situation where I have multiple Google Home thread border routers, and like you originally described, there are times where Inovelli switches will disconnect and the only remedy is to pull the air gap.
What I’ve been doing to on-board the switches is to first add them to Google Home, and then afterwards use the multi-admin feature in Google Home to add them to Home Assistant. The only issue I run into is the occasional disconnect, and that impacts it both in Google Home and Home Assistant.
Did your investigation/solution above solve that particular problem, or was it something else?
My system is super stable now, using the solution above. My guess is that Matter 1.4 will make many cloud disconnect issues go away, both on the Google and Inovelli sides.
I had a couple air gap outages before this solution, but not that many. However, I had mass Google Home disappearances that required Google thread border router reboots and temporary Google Home disappearances. I was preparing to ditch Google Home/assistant altogether before trying Matter Hub.
In the end I did not buy a thread radio for my HOME ASSISTANT box, as Google allows HA to use its thread radios and it is stable for now… But I could imagine situations where my Internet going out could break it.
My router was a CenturyLink c4000xg, if I remember right, and I replaced it with a Flint 3. I think my new router fixed IPV6 communications between to 2 Google thread radios, fixing the mass Google Home outages.
Matter Hub fixed the temporary outages, and significantly improved Google home response time and state reporting (implying some inherent Google cloud issues).
No idea what the extra matter fabric during Home Assistant onboarding is all about, but multi-admin is a known crash issue, and I can imagine a dead end fabric causing issues within Google home too. The above solution circumvents the multi-admin instability by only giving HA admin control.