Nanoleaf Essentials Matter BR30 | E26 Smart Bulb (3 Pack)

Bought 9 of these new Matter bulbs, and they are very unreliable. Connecting them took several attempts, most of the time they show as unresponsive, and when they are connected they are slow and often show the wrong color. Firmware updates are desperately needed. Hopeful this gets fixed soon and the many other (non Matter) Nanoleaf bulbs work flawlessly. The app is also a bit of a mess and constantly crashes.

We had the shapes, thought they were really cool. But the Nanoleaf app is… terrible and glitchy. These new matter bulbs crash the app 95% of the time, and the bulbs only sometimes decide to work in the Apple Home app, which is still more reliable than the Nanoleaf app. Lights constantly say unreachable, come back for a second, then go unreachable again.

I have quite a few Nanoleaf bulbs and while I love the quality of the bulbs themselves, set-up is not intuitive or straightforward. It was a lengthy process of trial and error… and more error than I would have hoped for. Adding the bulbs through HomeKit would often fail. In some instances, I had to reset the bulb multiple times before it would finally connect. And even then, it would be a lengthy process before it worked reliably. You need to update the firmware through the Nanoleaf app which in and of itself is a time-consuming process that doesn’t always work on first try. There is no clear information regarding the connection through Matter. A cryptic “Connect to Matter” notice would appear in the app along with a button to “Disconnet from HomeKit”. What?? Am I connected to Matter? If so, why not say “Connected to Matter” instead of just “Connect.” It is simply not clear. The struggle continues on multiple levels because a lot of Matter enabled bulbs don’t connect to the thread network. They connect through Bluetooth making them less functional. The primary thing that I learned from this lengthy process is how important time is in the scheme of things. The process cannot be rushed and it sometimes takes a day or two for a bulb to connect properly to the network through thread. It shouldn’t be this difficult. At the very least, it would be helpful if Nanoleaf explained the process better. I received conflicting information from support and it simply wasn’t very useful in the end. When the bulbs function, they are great. But it is a long row to hoe to get to that point.