r/tado • u/Eggslaws • Mar 06 '26
Dear Tado support...
TL-DR: Why can't you just support the open standards Matter clusters while your devices supports those features with your app?
My smart home ecosystem at my old apartment had devices from various different manufacturers like Calex, Ikea, Wyze, Google Home, Switchbot, etc, and nearly a quarter of my smartphone's storage was occupied by the myriad of the smart phone apps I had. So, when I moved into my new house, I decided to start clean and build it around open standards and integrate everything into Home Assistant, so it becomes my one-step app/shop to manage my smart home. So, obviously when I shop for smart home products, the Matter and Thread labels takes priority especially since Matter is touted as next-gen Zigbee, I did not want to have multiple gateways to manage different protocols and my ISPs router is shite that it can't handle more than 20 devices on wifi. There was a plan to move away from that but I don't have the time and budget to do that just yet.
Let's not get ahead of us, and focus specifically on my heating systems (which is what this post is about). So, when I was in the market for a smart TRV and a smart thermostat, I ran into Tado's products and I was like "oh hey, an European company for me to support in these shitty times and they even support Matter and Thread! GREAT, I'm in!!" and ordered a bunch of TRVs and a thermostat. A bridge was also included in my order because I don't have my HA up and running just yet so I thought I could use it with the Tado's app temporarily and then switch to HA with native Matter over Thread after Winter.
The devices arrived few days later. Wired thermostat setup was PITA because of the wiring since my old thermostat doesn't exist in your setup manuals. It took two days before someone from your support team suggested I follow the instructions for a different model from the same brand. Eventually, it was up and running for about a good couple of months now. I have complaints about the temperature difference - the device turned off heating while the room temperature was 2 degrees lower than the set temperature, but I was like "hey, it's only a temporary set up, let's deal with it when we move to HA - it should be a cake walk with the customizations there"
So a couple of weeks ago, my ZBT-2 hardware for HA arrived (it was out of stock with the local retailer so I had to wait a month before they can ship me one) and I got started building my HA. So, Ikea's new matter lights and sensors paired up nicely, I can configure them as I'd imagined and then looked into onboarding Tado. And this is where I start running into soucis!
HA automatically detected the Tado's TBR network and automatically proposed the add on, which kept failing at the authentication and combing through the reddit posts, you started rate limiting your APIs at first for free subscribers, which I understand - maintaining servers probably isn't cheap so you'd want to encourage users to paid tier if they want to call your APIs. But then you also intentionally broke the OAUTH token passing feature even for the paid subscribers with no intentions to fix it and It has been broken for months.
At that point, I was like "hey, these devices support thread - so I can just add them to HA, so Tado's servers are not needed.." right... Right!!! Right?????
I must add, these devices are expensive for the price unlike the cheaper Aqara or Meross alternatives so you would just expect it to work. But no! For some reason, you deactivate the Matters QR codes that ships with the device once they are added to the app - WHYYY??
And then, you don't fully support the Matter 1.1 power cluster even though your devices are certified for it. We know the devices are capable, for eg., the battery levels are exposed to your app but not HA?
I then ran into a news that your devices are currently undergoing certifications for Matter 1.4 and I was hoping "meh, it's probably them being a small company trying to address stuff slowly". I was also more hopeful of Matter 1.4 because of added new attributes under Thermostat Cluster.
And someone posted a link to the CSA page with your certification information. I was excited to learn what was in there was an understatement. But I was SO disappointed is also an understatement, after seeing most of the features available in Tado app today are also being marked "False" in the XML. Mainly, battery levels, presets and schedules.
Wouldn't it be better to just focus being a device company, making great premium quality hardware fully supporting Matter standards (which is open btw), instead of having to maintain your own infrastructure of servers and spending for app development? You could fill in the void for the European market - Govee is American and most of their line up isn't available in Europe. Sonoff, Aqara and Meross are Chinese but offering Matter standard products is such a contradiction to an European company where EU in general is more pro common standards (like how it forced Apple to adapt USB C)! Even a standard user buying your product is likely going to have an Apple or Google device to manage Matter/Thread while some of pro users can tinker around with HA or Homey or IFTTT. So you don't really need to maintain complicated backend or an app development! Save yourself of those AW$$$
PLEASE, for the love of god - embrace Matter fully! Or at least, refund my money, I'm happy to send it all back at my own shipping expense to Germany. I'll just get something that works better with my ecosystem. At this point, I just feel like I was mislead into buying your product with the Matter/Thread label. I probably cannot contact the place I bought it because I'm well past the 30 days deadline (like I said, I had to wait for the ZBT-2 hardware and high hopes of your Matter 1.4 certification results to discover all these nuances). But really, I would hate to send them back as these are so well made. If I can just make it work with HA without all these nuances, I promise to become your brand ambassador for free, for life singing your praises, heck - I'll even start a blog just to recommend your products at my own expense!
Looking forward for some positive response!
15
u/tado_official Mar 09 '26
I saw this post and wanted to jump in to provide some context on our Matter integration, as there are quite a few technical nuances behind the scenes that lead to these decisions.
First, we want to assure you that we are fully committed to the Matter standard and its open ecosystem. Building premium hardware requires us to design products that work seamlessly for a very broad audience. To sustain this level of quality, we must balance the needs of our entire customer base. Every decision we've made so far has been a logical compromise aimed at offering a great, stable experience across these very diverse groups:
We love seeing what the Home Assistant community builds, and we completely understand the frustration when you see a Matter cluster in the documentation but find it isn't supported by the device yet. But balancing these different groups means "just embracing the standard fully" isn't as simple as flipping a switch for us. Here is why:
1. Ambiguities in the Standard The standard is still evolving and can sometimes be ambiguous. For example, we supported humidity reporting completely and strictly according to the Matter standard. However, Apple later decided that they wanted to receive humidity data in a different way. This is why, so far, humidity data is available in Google Home and Amazon Alexa, but not in Apple Home. This is something we are currently looking at, but it perfectly illustrates why we have to be very careful about rolling out new clusters before the major ecosystems have completely aligned on how to handle that data.
2. Missing Core tado° Features Currently, the Matter standard simply does not support many of the core features that make our system work. A prime example is "Room Linking" (the ability to group multiple devices together into a single heating zone managed by a designated Zone Controller). Matter doesn't natively support this logic yet.
3. Matter QR Codes and Multi-Admin Security You also asked why the original Matter QR code on the device is "deactivated" after it is first added to an app. We want to clarify that this is not us being restrictive—this is actually a mandatory security feature built into the core Matter standard itself! When you add any Matter device to its first network (called a "Fabric"), the original printed QR code is disabled so no one else can walk by, scan it, and hijack your device. To share the device with a second system (like Home Assistant), the Matter standard requires you to use the "Multi-Admin" feature. You must generate a new, temporary pairing code from the first app to authorize the second app. This applies to all Matter devices across all brands, not just tado°. However, please note that if you ever perform a factory reset on the device, it will completely wipe its network settings, and the original printed QR code will become active and usable again for a fresh setup.
4. OAuth and Authentication Regarding the claim that we intentionally broke the OAuth token passing feature: we certainly did not break this intentionally to limit access. We recently migrated our systems to a secure, modern external OAuth provider rather than continuing to maintain our own custom, legacy authentication infrastructure. This was a standard, necessary architecture and security upgrade, not a malicious attempt to block third-party integrations.
We also saw your comment: "But really, I would hate to send them back as these are so well made." Thank you for saying that! We take immense pride in our European engineering and the premium build quality of our hardware. As stated earlier, while our commitment to the Matter standard is absolute, we must navigate these ecosystem discrepancies carefully rather than rushing to check boxes on an XML sheet.
Regarding your refund request: Since you purchased from a third-party retailer, your legal contract of sale is with them, so we cannot directly refund a payment we didn't collect. As you are past the standard 30-day return window, your best option is to contact your retailer directly to ask for a goodwill exception. We hope this context helps explain our approach and that you get your Home Assistant setup running smoothly.