Aqara Releases Hub Update for Adaptive Lighting

Aqara is issuing an update to their recently released M1S hub in order to enable Apple’s Adaptive Lighting to the company’s lighting portfolio of products. The firmware update is only for the M1S, not any variant of the original Aqara hub, and will be pushed to users of the global version of the Aqara M1S starting today, with owners of the Chinese variant of the hub getting the update (v2.3.4) on April 2nd (HomeKit News’ 3rd birthday, as it happens!). The company also state that Adaptive Lighting support will be coming at a later date for the Aqara Hub M2.

If you’re an owner of any Aqara products, you’ll probably be wondering what lighting products they’re referring to (!), as currently, the only product with full Aqara branding, is the white colour temperature bulb. This is one device that will work with Adaptive Lighting via the update, but there are other products that may well benefit from the update at a point in the future, namely the Opple Ceiling light range (pictured above).

Aside from these products, the company do sell a light strip that could benefit from the update, although these strips are not actually for sale to the general public, and are only sold to contractors and installers, due to the fact that they require an Aqara dimming module and a voltage converter to work, so they’re not like the off-the-shelf light strips you can typically find for HomeKit use.

We’ll be putting the Aqara bulb to use with the new update once it arrives for our Chinese M1S and update the article with any of our findings later.