Hi, I don’t see much discussion about the new Homey Matter Bridge app, so I thought I’d share some of my own experiences.
First, after installing the app, connecting Homey as a Matter device did not work. Homey support suggested pulling the power from the Homey Pro for 10 minutes before trying again, and that worked.
Next, I connected it to Apple Home, with varied success:
A Sonoff leak sensor, which is supposed to work, showed up in Apple Home as “Not supported”, but it works through Homekitty
All other devices (lights, door lock, sensors) were exposed to Apple Home as expected, but all of them with poor stability. Some show status out of sync with Homey/real life, some time out when trying to control, like turning on a light
Without no apparent trigger, many of the devices were moved into the room in Apple Home where the Homey bridge was placed
My hope of getting out of HomeKit Experiment and Homekitty was quickly quashed.
To see if Apple Home was the issue, I next connected to Home Assistant, but with exactly the same result; instability and slow response. I have heard a similar story from people trying it with Google Home.
My conclusion for now is that this is a good start, but so far too immature to be a workable solution.
I’ve been testing the app for about 12 days now and haven’t encountered any problems so far. Installation and connection to an Apple HomePod mini also worked without any issues.
Edit
The only thing that bothers me so far is the enormous memory usage of approx. 120–130 MB RAM on average.
The app with the second-highest memory requirements uses “only” approx. 80 MB RAM.
Ah, you are right about the leak sensor, i thought I saw it on the list of supported devices.
And promising to hear that it has been working well for you? Could I ask, after connecting over Matter, did you disconnect those devices if they had been connected through other channels?
@DirkG I meant that if you previously had devices connected to Apple Home using either the Experiemental HomeKit integration or the Homekitty app, did you remove those connections after getting those same devices into Apple Home using Matter now?
I first paused the HomeKitty app so that it could no longer transfer devices to Apple Home. After that, I set up the Homey Matter Bridge app and started transferring some devices to Apple Home.
I tried out the Matter Bridge app for a few days in this configuration before I deleted the HomeKitty app completely.
Yesterday evening, however, for the first time, some devices in my Apple Home were automatically moved to the room where the bridge is located, as you had already reported.
I’ll report this issue to the app developer.
I can’t say I am glad you experienced a similar issue, but it makes me a little relieved. And I guess that also proves that removing the old connection, such as Homekitty, does not solve the issue.
I will be waiting for future versions and see if this stabilizes.
I noticed that the movement of devices to room where bridge is located had to do in my case with smart sockets where you entered a lamp is connected in Homey that those devices are moved back to the default room.
I tried with a Hue light (“Philips Hue, without the bridge” app) and the Matter Bridge app linked to my Apple Home. I noticed that controlling the light’s colour from the Apple Home app uses a wrong color, e.g. setting the colour to purple makes the light turn blue. Do other users also see this?
With the HomeKit Experiment I did not have this issue.
