Aqara is back at IFA with a lineup built entirely around lighting, following a run of smart home firsts the company showed off at CES. The new hardware is compatible with both Zigbee and Thread.
The headline piece is the Floor Lamp T1, a 4.6-foot pole rather than a traditional lamp shape. It uses RGBIC lighting across 18 individually addressable zones and, similar to Govee's floor lamp, throws light into the space around it — including a wash of color on the wall behind it.
Aqara is also moving lighting outside the house. Alongside new permanent outdoor lights with individually addressable LEDs, the company is launching RGBIC string lights that can be set to a range of colors for holidays or switched to warm and cool white for everyday ambience.
The LED light strip gets an update too. It keeps the same 16-million-color range as the previous version but adds a new chip supporting multi-zone control, with 18 independent zones per 3-meter section. A second-generation downlight rounds out the lineup, available in 4- and 6-inch sizes with either RGB-CCT (color plus tunable white) or plain RGB.
On the compatibility side, all of the lighting products Aqara revealed at IFA work with Matter-enabled platforms — Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, SmartThings, Home Assistant, and Homey — through Thread.
What's missing from the announcement is any word on pricing or availability.
Here's the thing: a spec sheet with 18 addressable zones and multi-zone LED chips is easy to admire on a trade-show floor. It's a different exercise once a real price tag and a ship date show up next to it. Aqara built its pitch on broad compatibility — Zigbee, Thread, and a long list of Matter platforms — which is the right instinct in a category where nobody wants a lightbulb that only talks to one app. That's a genuine selling point for buyers who don't want to get locked into a single ecosystem's walled garden.
But compatibility on paper isn't the same as a product on a shelf. Until Aqara publishes what these lights actually cost, the lineup is a roadmap, not a purchase. Read the changelog when the receipts show up.
