Apple’s iOS 18 smart home upgrade will light up your life – automatically

Apple's Adaptive Lighting feature, which enables your lights to change colour temperature automatically, is now coming to Matter-enabled smart lights and bulbs. The upgrade will arrive in iOS 18.

One of the most interesting smart home features in Apple's HomeKit platform is Adaptive Lighting, a clever feature that changes the tone of your smart lights from dawn till dusk. It's been there since iOS 14 but it's also quite limited in terms of the lights you can use with it: you can use HomeKit-compliant Nanoleaf lights and Philips Hue lights and only a few other firms' products. However, that's about to change with iOS 18.

The big difference? Matter. With iOS 18 Apple is bringing Matter support to the Adaptive Lighting feature, and that means it'll work with a much wider ecosystem of smart lights and smart bulbs. The feature leaked via Nanoleaf users on Reddit, who spotted a toggle in the iOS 18 beta for their Nanoleaf Matter bulbs; Nanoleaf has since confirmed to The Verge that it's one of the launch partners for Adaptive Lighting for Matter products.

What is Adaptive Lighting?

Adaptive Lighting takes advantage of lights that can change their colour temperature, which is how warm or cool the white tones are: warmer tones are yellowish like old incandescent bulbs, and cooler ones are more blue, like LED car headlights.

Adaptive Lighting adjusts those tones over the course of the day to make your lighting work much like daylight does. So you'll wake to warm, sunrise-y tones, but as the day progresses the colour temperature will become cooler to help you focus on getting things done. As the day turns to night the colours warm up again, cutting blue light and helping you get ready for a good night's sleep.

The feature works really well, but up till now it's been exclusive to HomeKit-compliant products – and that's a subset of the much larger smart bulb market, which is increasingly embracing the Matter interoperability standard. That's particularly true of more affordable brands and sub-brands; getting the HomeKit label has traditionally been rather expensive, a cost that some firms haven't been willing to incur.

For the time being, Adaptive Lighting-compatible Matter lights and bulbs will only deliver the feature in Apple smart homes; it's an Apple feature, not a Matter one. But it's likely that we'll see similar options for other platforms too.