How to Use Apple Home Adaptive Lighting With Your Matter Lights

While the transition to Matter for Apple HomeKit users was pretty seamless, the omission of one major feature—Adaptive Lighting—left some smart home fans in the dark. Users who made the upgrade to Matter were no longer able to rely on Apple to make automatic color temperature adjustments to their lights, taking away a key part of the home automation experience.

Thankfully, that changes with the release of iOS 18. Apple is finally bringing Adaptive Lighting to Matter devices with its latest operating system, so users both new and old can put their home's lighting on auto-pilot.

Here's everything you need to know about Apple Home Adaptive Lighting.

What is Apple Home Adaptive Lighting?

As previously mentioned, Apple Home Adaptive Lighting automatically adjusts the color temperature of compatible light bulbs, strip lights, ceiling lights, and lamps. With Adaptive Lighting enabled, the Apple Home app intelligently makes adjustments throughout the course of the day with the aim of increasing productivity, energy, and rest.

A typical day with Adaptive Lighting starts with warmer (yellow) shades in the morning to help ease you into the day. In the afternoon, Adaptive Lighting will switch to cooler light (white/daylight) which is brighter, potentially boosting focus and energy levels.

During the evening hours, Adaptive Lighting will revert back to softer, warmer tones, which should help with winding down when it's time to head to bed. Shifting to warmer shades should also eliminate any shocking or jarring experiences when flipping on a light during a late-night snack run.

Adaptive Lighting even takes dimming into account. For instance, lowering the brightness on a bedside lamp at night will result in even warmer/yellower light and ramping it up during the day will produce brigher white light.

Apple Home Adaptive Lighting: What You'll Need

Apple's Adaptive Lighting feature requires the right combination of hardware and software to make the magic happen. While there are plenty of Matter color temperature light products on the market, only a few actually support Adaptive Lighting.

Currently, Nanoleaf's Essentials A19 Matter Smart Bulb and Light Strip—our picks for best Matter light bulbs and strip lights respectively—are the only compatible options at this time. Whichever Nanoleaf option you choose, you'll need to be running the latest firmware as well, which during our testing was version 3.6.196.

Speaking of software, you'll also need your iOS device to be running the newly released iOS 18. The same goes for your Apple Home Hubs with tvOS 18/HomePodOS 18 respectively, and once updated, you'll find the Adaptive Lighting setting in the Apple Home app.

If you don't see the option, you may need to restart your home hub, lights, and possibly your iOS device before it appears so don't get discouraged if you don't see it right away.

How to Enable Adaptive Lighting in the Apple Home App

Once you have met the requirements, you will need to open the Apple Home app on your iOS device. Upon launching the app, you should see a banner advertising the feature at the top of the Home page.

From there, you'll only need to follow the steps below to enable Adaptive Lighting:

• Launch the Apple Home App.
• Tap Set Up Lights.
• Select the lights that you wish to use with Adaptive Lighting.
• Tap Use With Lights to finish setup.

Alternatively, you can enable Adaptive Lighting when adding a Matter device to the Apple Home app. During the pairing process, you'll see a toggle for Adaptive Lighting on the suggested automation prompt, simply tap it to enable the feature.

It is important to note that enabling Adaptive Lighting doesn't automatically apply it to your lights. Read on to find the steps to actually using Adaptive Lighting with your lights.

How to Use Adaptive Lighting With Your Matter Lights

With Adaptive Lighting enabled, it is time to set your lights to use the feature. The process is incredibly easy as Adaptive Lighting appears alongside all of your existing colors on the device control screen for your light.

You can find it by following the steps below:

• Launch the Apple Home App.
• Navigate and tap your compatible light to bring up the device controls screen.
• Tap the Adaptive Lighting icon (looks like a shining sun) on the left side of the color picker.

In addition to toggling Adaptive Lighting manually in the Apple Home app, you can also use it in Scenes, Automation, and with voice commands through Siri. When creating a Scene or Automation, choose the Adaptive Lighting icon as you would with picking any other color to set it.

If you want to invoke Adaptive Lighting via Siri you can use phrases like "Hey Siri—Set the living room lamp to Adaptive" to set it on one device, or "Siri—Set the bedroom to Adaptive" to toggle an entire room.

How to Disable Apple Home Adaptive Lighting

While Adaptive Lighting takes the guesswork out of color temperature adjustments, it might not be for everyone. If you are not quite happy with Apple's color temperature choices, you can revert back to manual controls at any time.

Here's how to disable Adaptive Lighting:

• Launch the Apple Home App.
• Navigate and tap your compatible light to bring up the device controls screen.
• Tap the Color Picker icon (the one with multiple colors) on the right.
• Tap the Adaptive Lighting toggle to turn it off.

Note: the above method only applies to the currently selected light in the Apple Home app. If you have multiple lights, you'll need to toggle the Adaptive Lighting setting off on each individually.

Adaptive Lighting Makes Managing Your Matter Lights a Breeze

With Adaptive Lighting, you'll never have to worry about making color temperature adjustments to your lights again. Just remember, any temporary color changes you make will override Adaptive Lighting, so you'll need to set it back to resume automatic adjustments.