Adaptive Lighting is coming to Matter smart lights in Apple Home

A major feature of Apple Home will soon work with Matter devices. With iOS 18, Apple is enabling Adaptive Lighting for smart lights connected to its smart home platform through Matter, the interoperability standard developed by Apple, Amazon, and Google. The feature, which automatically adjusts the color temperature of smart lights throughout the day, currently only works with a few brands. Adding support for Matter bulbs means it should work with many more.

Gimmy Chu, CEO of Nanoleaf, confirmed to The Verge that his company is currently testing the feature on its line of Essentials Matter lights. “We are one of the partners that are part of the launch of Adaptive Lighting on Matter products,” he said in an interview. “For the past several months we’ve been doing extensive testing to ensure that the customers will have a great experience.”

This testing has led to Adaptive Lighting for Nanoleaf’s Matter products appearing in the iOS 18 betas, which is how The Verge first saw it. Users on Reddit in the betas reported seeing the toggle to enable Adaptive Lighting on their Nanoleaf smart bulbs.

Adaptive Lighting is popular among HomeKit users. Its ability to automatically adjust your lighting color temperature throughout the day, turning lights from cool to warm to make your home feel bright and refreshing or welcoming and cozy, is a nice, easy quality-of-life upgrade for your lights. It’s been part of Apple Home since iOS 14, but uptake among manufacturers has been slow — Nanoleaf and Philips Hue were among the first, and Eve and Aqara also have compatible products. But that’s about it.

Chu explained that as much as Nanoleaf wanted to have Adaptive Lighting on their new Matter products, it wasn’t possible, because Apple hadn’t enabled support for the feature in smart lights connected to its platform through Matter rather than HomeKit. (Hue users could keep Adaptive Lighting by not upgrading their bridge to Matter.)

But now, when iOS 18 arrives this fall, all of Nanoleaf’s Matter lights will work with Adaptive Lighting in Apple Home. The Verge reached out to Philips Hue to ask if it’s planning to enable the feature on its Matter bridge; as of publication, we have not heard back.

While this is good news for Apple Home users with Nanoleaf products (and likely Hue ones, too), it's also exciting for those with other brands of smart lights. “I believe that the vision for Adaptive Lighting is to be open to all partners that work with the Apple Home ecosystem via Matter,” said Chu.

That means Matter-compatible lighting products, including those from companies like Govee, LiFX, Wiz, and Linkind, could also work with the feature through Apple Home. The more compatible products there are, the easier (and cheaper) it will be to use Adaptive Lighting throughout your home.

Adaptive Lighting is an Apple Home exclusive feature and is not part of the Matter spec. This means it won’t work in other Matter-compatible ecosystems, like Amazon Alexa or Google Home. However, the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the organization that runs Matter, has previously said that more advanced lighting features, similar to Adaptive Lighting and the dynamic lighting effects companies like Nanoleaf and Govee use, are on its roadmap. If that happens, then those would work across all compatible platforms.