iOS 18’s Home app will enable Adaptive Lighting for Matter lights

iOS 18 will bring a huge variety of new features when it arrives this fall, including for pre-installed system apps. One such feature that was never formally announced: the Home app will enable Adaptive Lighting for Matter lights.

Adaptive Lighting is a Home feature that first arrived in iOS 14, but was previously limited to HomeKit devices.

Now, a recent iOS 18 beta has introduced a new Adaptive Lighting toggle for Matter smart lights too.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy reports for The Verge:

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.

Adaptive Lighting allows compatible lights to, per Apple, “adjust their color temperature, from cool blue to warm yellow. You can set supported lights to automatically adjust the color temperature throughout the day. Wake up to warm colors, stay alert and focused midday with cooler ones, and wind down at night by removing blue light.”

Matter has been pitched as a platform-agnostic smart home option that, in theory, is supposed to offer the best of HomeKit while also working well with other services like Alexa and Google Home. As a result, Adaptive Lighting’s omission has been a disappointment for owners of Matter lights until now.

Though Nanoleaf is the only company that has formally confirmed Adaptive Lighting support for its Matter lights, Apple is no doubt working with other leading companies such as Philips to bring the feature to their lights in iOS 18 too.

Here is a selection of Matter smart lights available on Amazon:

• nanoleaf multicolor LED lightstrip
• Philips Hue A19 LED light bulb
• Philips Hue ambiance lightstrip
• Philips Hue smart table lamp