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Ikea has a new hub and app that could bring an end to its smart home usability issues. Ikea’s new Matter-ready Dirigera hub is now official after a month of leaks and is set to arrive alongside an entirely new Ikea Home Smart app. Unfortunately, both the hub and the new app aren’t scheduled to arrive until October.
That’s around the same time that Matter is supposed to launch, the new smart home standard that promises to make connected devices more interoperable, flexible, and private, no matter if you purchased them from the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, or any of the long list of companies already signed up.
Ahead of today’s announcement, Ikea’s Björn Block, business area manager, and Rebecca Töreman, business leader, showed me the new hub and app working together in a real-time demonstration. I saw several devices added — or “on-boarded” in Ikea-speak — without a hiccup. It certainly looked intuitive and reliable, which are two words that most people wouldn’t readily associate with the company’s current Trådfri gateway and Home Smart app.
“With Dirigera and the new app, our focus has been on strengthening and simplifying the on-boarding process when connecting new smart products to the smart home,” says Töreman. “The robustness of the experience is far more reliable, and I think that is something that we’re really proud of,” says Block. “It’s really something that works consistently over and over again.”
Before we dive into what the new hub can do, let’s start with its name: Dirigera. It means “conducting” in Swedish. Ikea’s also calling it a “hub” to differentiate it from the other white puck-shaped “gateway” it’s replacing.
Background
As Ikea tells it, the old Trådfri gateway that’s being replaced first debuted in 2014 when Ikea’s smart home ambitions were just a hobby and still rooted in the lighting division. “When we did the [Trådfri gateway], we only knew about lighting,” says Töreman. “Smart homes were new to us and many of our customers as well.” As such, Ikea made the decision to make “steering devices” like dimmers and switches the primary means for controlling Ikea’s smart bulbs. To add those lightbulbs to the Trådfri gateway, you had to add their steering device first, which was… odd.
Home Smart became a full-fledged strategic business area in the middle of 2019 under Block’s leadership, putting it alongside traditional business areas like Living Room, Bedroom, and Textiles in terms of importance to the company. Overnight, Block’s hobby was embraced by all of Ikea with a budget to match his ambitions.
It was the Home Smart business area that developed the new Dirigera hub, with insights the team has gained over the last eight years. That means it was built from the ground up to support the entire Ikea Home Smart ecosystem as it exists today — covering lighting, blinds, sound, and air purification — as well as what’s still to come. I was given a preview of this work at the end of 2019. Some of it already made its way into firmware releases for the Trådfri gateway and updates to the Home Smart app, which did help improve the overall user experience. But the body can only do so much if the bones are bad.
Block’s Home Smart team has been ramping up their in-house software expertise during the pandemic to match Ikea’s skill at making furnishings for “the many people.” (The company is very fond of repeating this phrase despite its questionable syntax, as it stems from the company’s motto: “to create a better everyday life for the many people.”)
“We have accelerated tremendously in the last two years. We have invested heavily in digital competence,” says Block, “hiring in every field from UX design and software development to data management and data privacy. The coworkers who are digital specialists have a lot to teach our life-at-home experts, and vice versa.”
With Ikea’s own Home Smart house now in order, Block thinks everything is in place to fully embrace Ikea 2.0. “The preconditions for mass adoption are here,” says Block. “So the mission that we are on with enabling the smart home for the many people, a smarter living for the many people, democratizing the smart home — we see that the opportunity is now. It’s a massive undertaking, of course, but also the greatest opportunity in order for Ikea to retain leadership in life at home.” Block believes that the trust Ikea has gained from customers buying its home furnishings will extend to sales of its smart home products.
Ikea will continue doing living rooms and kitchens and everything we expect from the company; its products are just going to get a lot smarter if Block and Töreman have their way. That means more integrations like speakers built into lamps, bookshelves, and wall art; wireless chargers built into desktop lamps and tabletops; air purifiers baked into side tables; and whateve
