An interview with Gimmy Chu, co-founder and CEO of Nanoleaf (link), about the company’s decision not to launch any new products with Matter over Thread for the time being. What led to this move and why Nanoleaf is nevertheless committed to the cross-manufacturer smart home standard.
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There have been some headlines that certain manufacturers are turning their backs on the Thread protocol in the Matter standard. Nanoleaf was one of the first to support Thread, but now prefers to use Wi-Fi for new products. Are you turning your back on the protocol?
Gimmy Chu: I wouldn’t use the term turning our back. Offering Wi-Fi is an additional solution. We realized that people were buying our products because they were Thread. But they were also not buying them because of Thread. Look at the penetration: Do you think ten percent of households have Thread? And how many of this tenth even know that they have thread?
“How many people actually know that they have Thread?”
The customers find out that it requires a Border Router and say: what the heck is a Thread Border Router? Or they buy the product, take it home and realize they can’t pair it with their smart home ecosystem. Even though it’s a Matter product.
A difficult situation …
Gimmy Chu: Right. So one of my complaints that I made to the Matter Group was: You need to set a standard for Matter Controllers. It doesn’t make sense that not all Matter Controllers can control all Matter products. I think that the mistake was made very early on. When Thread was introduced, there was this thought that people didn’t need to know what the underlying technology was. So they never spoke about Thread or what the customers need to have.
On top of that, the initial development of Thread and Matter had its hiccups. The solution was not good, and Border Routers were inconsistent. They still are to some degree. We as the early entrance into the space, we got a lot of the blame, but what people didn’t realize is that Thread is highly dependent on the Border Router solution.
“It’s highly dependent on the Border Router solution”
Over time, however, this has improved. The problems with Thread still exist but are becoming less frequent.
Gimmy Chu: A lot of improvement has been made. Apple especially, they’ve done a lot of work to make it much, much better, especially with iOS 17 and 18. With iOS 18 they released the ability to create a Thread network without the need for a Border Router. But now it comes to educate the customers that an iPhone 15 pro or an iPhone 16 with integrated Thread Radio is necessary.
The penetration of Wi-Fi routers is much higher, like over 99%. Everyone’s got a Wi-Fi router at home. We needed to make technology that was really accessible. As an example: In the US we are launching into Walmart. I can’t educate the Walmart customer on what Thread is. Not to say anything negative about Walmart customers, but they don’t have the time to try and research all this stuff.
So it’s not that we are turning our back on Thread or Matter. Rather, we’ve done something a little bit proprietary to make it work 100% of the time.
You are talking about your own proprietary Lightwave technology introduced with the Sense+ remote. Is it built on top of the Thread protocol?
Gimmy Chu: In parallel, so it works simultaneously with Thread. Take our Sense+. You can connect it to a Matter system like Apple Home via Thread. Then everything runs via the Border Router. But it’s a light switch with six buttons motion and brightness sensors, and you’ve seen the platforms. If you needed to create a custom setting for each one of these buttons and program it, nobody’s ever going to use it.
It needs to be simple, and so we decided to go our own path. The beauty of it is that it works in parallel. You could have the side buttons programmed to do Matter, to close your blinds, turn on your TV, do whatever. But it also works with our Nanoleaf products with the speed and reliability required. Because it’s a light switch, it has to.
“This is where Thread and Matter needs to be”
You don’t need any hub or sort of connectivity. It works locally and fast. With Wi-Fi, you need to connect to the router, establish an IP address and all that stuff. It might take a couple of seconds. With Thread, the speed depends on the Border Router, some are able to reconnect immediately, some take a little longer. Our solution reacts instantly. Even after a power cycle of the lights, it is online straight away. I can switch scenes with it. This is where Thread and Matter needs to be.
How long do you think it will take for Thread and Matter to get there?
Gimmy Chu: These are things where the stars need to align. It’s not my place to estimate it, but the challenge is when you have all these big giants trying to work together to create something. Sometimes they pull in different directions and it’s hard to get agreement. It’s not for a lack of trying, you know, I work very closely with the Matter Group, the folks from the Thread Group and I share with them a lot of this feedback.
Originally, when we created the Sense+, it all worked through Thread and Border Router. But we couldn’t get these details like immediate control after a power cycle, the latency, that no commands get missed. We asked ourselves: Can I simply program this in our app so that customers don’t have to do it? For six buttons plus motion sensor plus brightness sensor – imagine setting that up through a Matter Controller.
“Sometimes they pull in different directions and it’s hard to get agreement”
What does this mean for announced software updates of your Thread products? The Skylight, for example, should also support Matter.
Gimmy Chu: Thread and Matter are two different things. Our Shapes product line, for example, is also a Thread Border Router. Just like the Skylight. It also has a Border Router built in, and you can control it with our Sense+. But it doesn’t support Matter right now. Why? Because Matter doesn’t support scenes. I could not say “set my lights to Northern Lights” using Matter. HomeKit supports this, as do Google Home and Alexa via cloud support and SmartThings. But it’s not yet possible with current Matter connections.
We don’t want to take away features from our customers. For us from a user perspective, a big part of the experience is the ability to trigger scenes. It’s unfortunate that not everyone understands this, but these scenes are one primary reason that make our products so special. Once Matter is ready, we will do that update.
Does this mean that the announced Nala Bridge for intelligent light control will also not be released for the moment?
Gimmy Chu: The Nala Bridge was a bit of a different thought. At the time we announced it we didn’t realize that Matter was going to force everyone to have a Matter Controller. Apple, Google, everyone was going to create their own hub and we thought that we needed a Border Router in order for everything to work. But as we continued to develop Lightwave we decided to bypass the Border Router completely, make it a Mesh network of its own, and basically all the things that Thread had promised were created in our own proprietary way. A way that’s very lightweight, that works very well.
That was the key thing. I know that people are really excited about some of these new standards, new technologies and in theory, it’s all great. But in practice, I think the industry needs a little bit more time to get it to a perfect state. But it’s getting there. It’s starting to get much more stable.
“The industry needs a little bit more time”
Under what conditions would you again offer new Thread products in addition to Wi-Fi?
Gimmy Chu: I think the Thread versus Matter are different conversations. The Thread part has more to do with the penetration of either Border Routers or control devices that are capable of doing Thread. If I had to guess, it’s probably talking four years before the new iPhones, the new Pixels are all Thread devices. And then Border Routers, who knows, it might never really get there. That’s why we think Wi-Fi is the more accessible option for people.
Matter, on the other hand, is supported by all of our new Wi-Fi products. It’s just that some of our flagship products like Shapes, Lines, Skylight are much more complex. They have a lot more features, and some of those features would go away if you switch to Matter. So we want to make sure that we actually do that correctly.
There would be a way to implement things like scenes, which were introduced in the standard with Matter 1.3. You could offer your own Matter Controller. Would that be a viable option for Nanoleaf?
Gimmy Chu: Not at the moment, it’s not in our plans. I think that there’s a reason the Big Four are the BIG4. They have a value proposition beyond just being a smart home controller. They’re also a phone. They’re also a voice assistant. They’re a TV device. They’re computers. They’re the ones that should be that Matter Controller. Like we might have devices that create unique experiences within our ecosystem.
“There’s a reason the Big Four are the BIG4”
I would rather work in parallel and allow our devices to speak with Matter. I don’t think we’re in a position to be a better Matter Controller than Apple Home is. Not because of the effort. We already created Border Routers, we create Matter end devices, we already have an app. But would you want to funnel everything in your app through Matter and then suddenly no longer have control over your own destiny?
To add a feature to our app I would have to go to the Matter Group and say I need you guys to change this. And then – six years later – we all agree on a solution. That is not the right answer. Not for us, at least. We do our control devices, the control devices support Matter. We’ll let Matter figure out the button profile and all of the platforms will eventually have it. It’s pretty certain that this will happen.
In our interview about two years ago, you said that Matter has moved exceptionally quickly through development. Would you still put it that way today?
Gimmy Chu: You totally caught me on this. How can I say that without offending anyone … it was very challenging as we got deeper into the details. I don’t think anyone expected it to take this long and have the issues that it had. The whole Matter industry is working very hard to solve them, and there’s a lot of really smart and capable people working on it.
“A lot of really smart and capable people working on it”
The biggest challenge is that the big tech giants don’t always see eye to eye on how something should be done. It’s sort of you could go this way, you could go this way – all right, let’s compromise and go into the middle of nowhere. Sometimes that happens with technology decisions and it’s always a terrible way to design. Design by committee is not recommended, I would say.
When you have a lot of people too, it’s a too many cooks in the kitchen kind of challenge and hard to make decisions. But that’s the case for any type of standard. So I think overall overtime it will work out. There’s a saying: If you want to move fast, go alone. If you want to move far, go together. That’s probably the best way of putting it.
Mr. Chu, thank you very much for this interview.
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