Ikea’s smart bulbs now offer one of Philips Hue’s most attractive features
- Ikea’s smart lights can now intelligently adjust throughout the day
- These are not the first lamps to do this, and Ikea is taking a page from Philips Hue’s book
- It remains to be seen whether these intelligent features will be expanded
Although Ikea’s smart lights (lamps, fixtures and bulbs) are generally much cheaper than Philips Hue products, a new update sees the furniture giant taking a page out of the more expensive smart lighting brand’s book. Oh, and Apple’s too.
The Ikea Home Smart app for iOS has added the ability for dynamic adaptive lighting, meaning the different connected lights can intelligently change brightness and color throughout the day. Ikea summarizes the feature succinctly as “It’s great for the body, mind and soul.”
Just like Apple Home’s Adaptive Lighting or Philips Hue’s ‘Natural’ scene, Ikea Home Smart will adjust the lights to cooler temperatures during the day and to warmer tones towards the end of the day. Ikea notes that the adjustments will happen automatically. But since you can manually set the brightness, color, and temperature, it’s likely you can ignore the adaptive adjustments or possibly build them into a custom routine.
Since Nanoleaf and Philips Hue lights integrate with Apple Home’s own adaptive lighting, it remains to be seen whether Ikea’s lineup will integrate with that standard. Remember that you previously needed an extra hub to use Ikea products within Apple Home.
The Dynamic and Adaptive Lighting update first appeared on Apple’s App Store on December 3, 2024, with a subsequent bug fix targeted on December 5, 2024. The Ikea Home Smart app for Android will release a new version on December 3, 2024but the Play Store does not provide details about the changes, as Notebook Check first noted.
Either way, considering how affordable Ikea’s smart lighting range is, scoring a feature found on more expensive bulbs and eco-systems is a real win. It could only increase the appeal of Ikea’s lamps if you’re considering investing in new smart home products.