Hue Bulbs Can Now Run Zigbee and Thread at the Same Time

Signify has started pushing firmware 1.164.2 to Philips Hue lights on the 100b-129 hardware platform. The release notes list bug fixes and stability work, added support for Matter 1.4.1, added support for Matter Apple adaptive lighting, and — the one that matters — support for Zigbee and Matter concurrency in bridgeless mode.

The update reaches every Hue device with a built-in Matter-over-Thread chip: all new 2026 products plus E27 bulbs and GU10 spotlights from autumn 2025. It arrives over the air to lights already installed, not as a hardware revision. Separately, the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 4K moves to firmware 3.5.2 for long-term operating stability.

Concurrency is the headline because of the problem it removes. Until now, a Hue owner moving to Matter faced a choice: commission the light directly into a Matter controller and lose the Bridge, or keep the Bridge and access Matter only through it. As Hueblog puts it, the change allows a direct Matter connection via Thread to be established in addition to the existing connection to the Hue Bridge. A light already paired over Matter should also be easier to add to a Hue Bridge installed later.

Two details are worth pulling out for product people. Silicon Labs and Signify announced this collaboration in June, and the mechanism is the MG26's ability to switch between protocols in roughly 50 microseconds. The cost is memory: a dual-protocol build needs more than 1 MB of flash and 384 to 512 KB of RAM, which is roughly double a single-protocol Zigbee image. That is the pressure Series 3 parts exist to absorb, and it's the reason concurrency has taken this long to ship in a bulb rather than a hub.

The other detail is a useful corrective. This firmware targets Matter 1.4.1, not 1.5, 1.5.1, 1.6 or 1.6.1. Shipping lighting firmware trails the specification by several releases, which is worth remembering the next time a feature matrix cites a spec version as though it were a product capability.