The new Matter release from Ikea has gained great popularity worldwide due to its unique design and good value. While the majority of feedback has been complimentary, some voices in the community have raised concerns about the Bilresa remotes. These complaints highlight not just issues with Ikea’s implementation, but a wider dilemma within the Matter smart home standard itself.
Are Bilresa remotes bad products?
Discussion on the new Bilresa remotes has grown on social media, including the Ikea Tradfri Reddit channel. Users are complaining about two main issues: the physical mechanism design and the features available in Matter.
Bilresa remotes come in two versions. One features two simple buttons, while the other includes a pressable wheel. Some users have found that the press feedback feels different across units purchased from the same batch. However, the wheel version presents a distinct design issue. The wheel is hard to rotate, and the physical press feedback is not distinct enough to tell if you successfully triggered a command. Some users argue that you need to find the exact right area to press for it to register.
BILRESA scroll wheel
A tactile scroll-wheel remote that lets you adjust light brightness, colour, and scenes with a simple turn or press.
BILRESA Remote Control with Dual Button
A simple, two-button remote that lets you control smart lighting functions like power, brightness, colour, and scenes from anywhere nearby.
To be honest, the previous Zigbee series was not perfect either in press feedback and the quality. Given the low price point, it is hard to complain too much about inconsistent build quality, especially considering Ikea’s generous return policy.
On the software side, the issue is more about how to automate the remotes with other smart home devices. The two switches are certified under the “Generic Switch” device type. Consequently, they are hard to automate for intuitive controls like dimming, which users assume should be easy but are actually difficult to achieve via Matter platforms. While some might blame Ikea or the network, the real issue lies with the utilities available on the Matter platform.
This is the elephant in the room.
Poor support for Matter switches
Matter has well-defined switch types with many variations. However, actual adoption is far from ideal, especially on the ecosystem side. The most common issue is the automation for single, double, and long press actions. This has been a basic feature since the initial Matter spec, yet Google and Alexa still have poor support for it. Home Assistant offers rather full support to utilize these events, but the actual experience of creating automations is still less friendly and might be buggy sometimes.
This contributes to users’ complaints about the Bilresa remotes. They simply show up as unnamed shortcut switches without a clear “Tag List” identity, a feature that is also unsupported by most Matter ecosystems.
Luckily, for Home Assistant users, there are well-written Blueprints or automation templates to help create automations easily. But for users in other ecosystems, it can be much more troublesome at the moment.
There is also a long-existing issue for Matter switches regarding the confusing user experience with the specification. For example, a dimmer switch may not always be wired to a light. It should be able to bind wirelessly with a Matter Dimmable Light as the spec states. But Matter platforms usually treat these remotes as devices to be controlled, rather than controllers that help users automate.
This creates a loop where vendors can do nothing but follow ecosystem rules when designing a product. As a result, we rarely see a true dimmer remote with native Matter support, and the same applies to Matter Window Covering Controllers and Thermostat Controllers.
The wheel dilemma
As for the Ikea Bilresa wheel version, Matter actually has a similar example for such a hardware. The standard defines it as a “Latching Switch” which has multiple stable positions arranged in a fixed sequence. With such a device, the user moves the switch from one position to the next, either forward or backward. On each interaction, the device generates an event reporting the new position value, which is simply the previous number plus or minus one.
But the support from ecosystems is not ideal right now. For example, it is hard to use a “rotate left” trigger to decrease the brightness of a light. Because ecosystems simplify it as a scene trigger, usually you can only set a specific brightness level. A relative command like “dim” is hard because it requires the automation to acquire the current level, subtract a specific percentage, and send the final value to the light. While the automation is intuitive and easy in the Ikea app, it is definitely not that easy for most other ecosystems.
We hope that Ikea and major ecosystems can work together to improve this user experience, which would help to grow the ecosystem healthily. As of press time, Ikea has yet to respond to Matter Alpha’s request for comment on the Bilresa remote issues.
(Source: Reddit, CSA; Image Source: Reddit, CSA, Ikea)
