This iOS 18 feature can save you time and frustration with Home accessories

iOS 18 is a big release with a ton of new features. Some enhancements to the Home app, like support for robot vacuum cleaners, aren’t coming until later. But there’s one update available now that could save you time and frustration. Building your smart home of the future just got easier than ever in iOS 18’s Home app.

Removing friction with Matter and Thread accessories

Have you ever bought a smart home product only to find that you need to download a separate app, or have a compatible hub to add it to Apple’s Home app?

That should be a far less frequent occurrence thanks to iOS 18.

Apple has published a new document outlining all of the new iOS 18 features. Among them is a key paragraph regarding the Home app:

Pair Matter accessories without a hub: Add and locally control Wi-Fi based Matter accessories to the Home app without needing a home hub. Thread-based accessory management is available with iPhone 15 Pro and later.

This addresses a shortcoming inherent to Matter and Thread-based smart home products up to this point.

Before iOS 18, HomeKit accessories could be added seamlessly to the Home app with no additional hardware or downloads. But that wasn’t the case for Matter, which is meant to be fully compatible with all smart home platforms.

Instead, you needed a home hub to enable the easiest setup of Matter accessories. Apple products like the Apple TV 4K and HomePod can serve as home hubs.

But if you didn’t have a hub, you couldn’t set up the accessory in Apple’s app. Instead, you’d need a third-party app download, which can be a hassle with all the permissions, account setup, and so on.

Now in iOS 18, Matter accessories can be added directly to the Home app with no extra hardware or software necessary. And if you have a Thread-based accessory, an iPhone 15 Pro or later is required because those are the only iPhones with Thread radios built in.

Home app support is obviously an important feature to a lot of Apple users. So these new changes make that better than ever.