Two of the smart home's most active brands pushed the same low-power radio into the spotlight this month. On July 17, Shelly's founder opened a public poll about adding Matter-over-Thread to the company's fourth-generation devices. The same week, Signify confirmed that Philips Hue will soon run its Zigbee and Thread radios at the same time, ending a years-long choice between the two.
The moves are small in headline terms. Together they point to a real change in how connected homes are wired. Thread, a mesh protocol built on the same IEEE 802.15.4 radio family as Zigbee, is moving from optional extra to expected foundation.
Shelly asks its users to pick a path
Shelly's signals came from an unusual place: a Facebook post in the company's official support community. Founder and co-CEO Dimitar Dimitrov laid out two firmware concepts and asked owners which they preferred. The hardware can already do it. Gen4 devices ship with an Espressif ESP32-C6 chip, which carries a 802.15.4 radio that can be flipped from Zigbee to Thread in software.
The catch is storage. Dimitrov wrote that the flash memory on current Gen4 units isn't large enough to hold a third firmware build — one that would add Wi-Fi, Thread, and Matter-over-Thread on top of today's features — without dropping something users value. The feature at risk is scripting. Shelly's scripting lets owners run JavaScript directly on a relay or dimmer, firing off HTTP requests, MQTT messages, and custom automations with no cloud in the loop.
Shelly floated two fixes. The first is a multi-step setup: a device ships on its existing firmware, gets configured over Wi-Fi, then pulls a special Thread build before it can act as a Thread or Matter-over-Thread node. The second is simpler but blunter — ship every Gen4 unit with a firmware that supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Thread, and Matter, and drop built-in scripting unless the user flashes a different build.
That second path would hit power users hardest. Scripting is one of the reasons installers and tinkerers pick Shelly over cheaper relays. Dimitrov's poll is, in effect, a referendum on which trade the community will accept.
An open-source proof already exists
The question of whether Matter-over-Thread works on Gen4 hardware was answered months ago by a single developer. A project hosted under the name "Jace" at the GitHub account automatous-io replaces the factory firmware on a Shelly 1 Gen4 and adds Thread support through the ESP32-C6's reconfigured radio. The device then joins Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, or Home Assistant natively, with no Matter bridge required.
The project isn't a replacement for Shelly's own software. It strips out the Shelly web interface, the app, and the management tools that define the brand. It also wipes scripting, since loading it means a full reflash. Dimitrov cited it to show the silicon is ready; the hard part, he said, is packing Thread into the official firmware without losing features customers already paid for.
Philips Hue will run two radios at once
Signify took a different, more decisive step. At an event hosted by the Connectivity Standards Alliance on June 23, the company and its chip supplier Silicon Labs said Hue will support parallel operation of Zigbee and Thread — either out of the box or through an over-the-air update. George Yianni, the chief technology officer for Philips Hue at Signify, said the last-generation Hue A19, Hue essential, the new Hue candle, and recent wired accessories will get the feature later this year.
The trick is Concurrent Multiprotocol, or CMP, Silicon Labs' name for running two wireless stacks on one chip. The relevant parts are the MG26 and MG301 system-on-chip families. Yianni said Signify plans to roll the next-generation chipset across all mains-powered Hue products. No fielded product has the software for concurrent multiprotocol yet, he noted, but those are coming.
The dual-radio design also lets the plugged-in lights act as routers in both networks at once, on separate channels. In a large home that means fewer repeaters to buy, because each Hue bulb strengthens two independent meshes. Battery devices such as remotes and sensors are excluded — they stay on one protocol.
Why a low-power mesh matters
Thread is easy to undersell. It isn't a product. It's a networking layer that carries IPv6 between small, battery-friendly devices. A Thread device can sleep for months on a coin cell and still stay reachable. A Zigbee device can do the same, but Zigbee ecosystems have long relied on vendor-specific hubs and bridges that don't talk to each other.
Matter, the smart-home standard from the Connectivity Standards Alliance, sits on top of either Wi-Fi or Thread. Matter-over-Thread is the part that lets a bulb, lock, or sensor join Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, and Home Assistant without a proprietary bridge, as long as a Thread border router is present. Border routers have quietly multiplied: Eero and Nest Wi-Fi units, recent Apple TV and HomePod models, and several third-party hubs all advertise the function.
Thread grew out of work by the Thread Group, whose members include Apple, Google, and a long list of silicon vendors. Its certification program is what lets a border router from one brand extend a mesh started by another. That interoperability is the quiet reason the protocol keeps showing up in hardware roadmaps.
Wi-Fi remains the default for cameras and speakers that need bandwidth. Thread fills the gap for the countless low-power sensors and switches that shouldn't each carry a Wi-Fi radio and a wall wart. That's why chipmakers and bulb makers are both pulling in the same direction.
What buyers should expect
For someone shopping now, the practical upshot is less churn. A Hue light bought this year will keep working with a Hue Bridge and also be reachable over Thread once the update lands. A Shelly Gen4 relay may gain Thread in a future flash, though owners who depend on scripting should watch the poll's outcome before assuming both will coexist.
The shift isn't free of friction. Hue's concurrent mode only helps plugged-in products, so battery remotes won't bridge the two meshes. Shelly's flash constraints mean the company must cut a feature to add the radio, or ask users to re-flash. Standards work rarely arrives clean.
Thread's rise also tracks the standard's own pace. The Connectivity Standards Alliance shipped Matter 1.6 earlier this year, adding shared fabrics so a device can belong to more than one home and giving thermostats finer control. Each release removes a reason for a vendor to stay walled off.
Still, the direction is clear. Thread is no longer the obscure third option. It's becoming the layer that the biggest names in smart lighting and smart relays plan their roadmaps around. Readers can follow our IoT coverage for ongoing updates, and the chip side of the story tracks our semiconductors coverage, since Silicon Labs' MG26 and MG301 parts sit at the center of Hue's move.
Signify and Silicon Labs detailed the Hue plan in a June 23 announcement (Silicon Labs newsroom). The Connectivity Standards Alliance maintains the public overview of the Matter standard and its Thread underpinnings at csa-iot.org. Shelly's Gen4 discussion was reported by matter-smarthome.de (Shelly evaluates Matter over Thread), and the open-source firmware proof is published at github.com/automatous-io.