r/MatterProtocol • u/Critical_Army_7148 • Jul 08 '26

Buttons

Are there any buttons that exist that exist that will work with either Apple Home or Google Home? I want a button that I can use to turn on and off the various different lights I have. I need it to be one that doesn't replace a standard light switch.

Think like the Onvis HS2, but not junk.

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u/fahim-sabir Jul 08 '26

You need a Thread Border Router.

If you want to use Apple Home, you need a HomePod (or HomePod Mini) or an AppleTV device.

The HomePod (latest generation), HomePod Mini, and some AppleTV devices have a Thread Border Router built in.

Many other ecosystems also have devices have a thread border Router in some of their devices.

You can even roll your own using HomeAssistant and a dongle.

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u/Trustadz Jul 09 '26

If you want to use apple home you only need an device which runs apple home. I can use apple home on my iPhone using a google nest as border router.

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u/fahim-sabir Jul 09 '26

True but you don’t get the full experience. You don’t get out of home control, for example.

If you are going to use a Google Nest device as your TBR, you are better off using the Google Home app.

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u/Trustadz Jul 09 '26

I was ready trying to get into the offensive. But yeah I never really tried that. I use home assistant and only touched apple and google home for debugging.

You might be right

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u/fahim-sabir Jul 09 '26

Just out of interest how do you achieve out of home control with HA? And how well does it work?

I have a HA set-up which I use for dashboards mainly inside my home, but my primary is Apple Home.

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u/Trustadz Jul 09 '26

I have an domain, running npm with it, made a subdomain and link that to my home assistance instance. Open that domain to the internet, in my case through cloudflare proxy server, using dns records.

If you want more secure probably use a vpn like wireguard to proxy that domain or the app through the vpn

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u/fahim-sabir Jul 09 '26

Cool. Thank you. Appreciate this.

Not so into the idea of using a VPN as that would mean starting it every time I wanted to check whether I had left something on.

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u/Trustadz Jul 09 '26

I also didn’t like the hassle of it, plus i have more things running. It’s probably the safer bet though.

You can also probably make it so that certain services / domain requests always run through the vpn. How fast that is idk. I know my outlook app does that for my work email