The Philips Hue lighting system will soon be compatible with Matter, thanks to support added to the Hue Bridge through a software update coming early next year.

It means that your Hue bulbs and accessories will soon work seamlessly with other Matter smart home products from multiple manufacturers bar a couple of exceptions. The Philips Hue Play HDMI sync box and the dial of the Philips Hue Tap Dial Switch will not support the latest version of the Matter standard, but may adopt a later variant in future.

They will still work with the rest of your Philips Hue products, however. It is just that they might be trickier to operate with some third-party devices.

The Hue Bridge is already now Matter certified, while the software patch will arrive in Q1 2023. Consumers shouldn't have to do much after the update - especially if you use the Hue App, Google and Amazon integrations - although they will have to reset their systems to connect it via Matter to Apple's HomeKit.

Matter support will enable Hue to work with many systems it doesn't presently. One example is that you could change your lighting moods to suit Spotify playback.

The new standard has been signed up to by companies across the smart home and connected spectrum and by unifying connection, it could make the communication between all of your smart devices much less painful.