Your Homey just got smarter (the smart home hub, not your friend) –

Smart home hubs Homey Pro and Homey Bridge are getting new capabilities ahead of CES 2024. Announced last year, the Homey Pro is the ultimate hub for your smart home, with support for almost every standard out there, including Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, Thread, and more. Meanwhile, the Homey Bridge is the cheaper of the two and misses out on many of these smart home standards. Still, both of them have an Infrared blaster in common.

Using this IR connectivity, both the Homey Pro and Homey Brindge now support AC controls — a unique feature to find in a smart home hub. So, if you have an infrared-controlled air conditioner at home, you can now control its temperature and other settings using the Homey Pro and Homey Bridge. The company has added a roster of supported AC brands and devices on the Honey App Store.

The company is also rolling out AC controls to its older smart home hubs, some of which were shipped eight years ago. The functionality will arrive through a software update to the hubs. It is currently available to users as a public beta and includes support for units from several popular brands like Mitsubishi and LG through their respective Homey Apps. In the coming months, the company will expand the capability to support more brands through new Homey Apps. After integration, users will be able to control their ACs using the Homey iOS and Android app as well as the Homey web app.

Apart from AC controls, there’s more news for Homey Pro users. The device already has a built-in Thread radio, but until now, it hadn’t been activated until now. The company is now enabling it through a software update, and the hub will directly connect to Matter-over-Thread devices from brands like Eve, Nanoleaf, and others.

The new capability is being released in beta and will be accessible for Homey Pro devices operating on software version 10.3 or above. Users can initiate Thread-pairing via the Homey mobile or web app.