[Straight from the PM] Aqara Home Lighting Experience: Give Us Your Brutal Truth

Jooooa · March 2, 2026, 6:57am

Hi everyone, I’m Joa, the Software Product Manager for Lighting here at Aqara.

I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that while great hardware sets the foundation, software defines the actual experience. Instead of sitting in a meeting room assuming what you need, I want to come here and hear directly from the people who use our lights every day.

We want to stop “building in the dark.” My goal with this post is simple: to gather your real frustrations and your wishlist features to guide our next development cycle.

We’ve been listening… and learning

Actually, we’ve been quietly lurking and listening to your conversations. We were blown away by the recent deep dives and creative “pro” setups some of you have shared.

It also gave us a reality check on where we’ve fallen short. Specifically, we realize the Aqara platform hasn’t provided enough support for high-level customization and open access. To fix this, we are planning to gradually open up more APIs and software capabilities for enthusiasts and developers to tinker with. We can’t wait to see you unlock new possibilities and push the boundaries of what our lights can do!

(Shoutout to the thread that inspired this: Home Assistant Aqara Lighting Integration)

Over to You

With that spirit in mind, we are looking for your input in two specific areas today:

1. Current Pain Points (The “Rants”)

Please don’t hold back. Tell us exactly what feels clunky, counter-intuitive, or unstable. Whether it’s the UI logic, connection speed, or the automation setup—if it makes you want to close the app, we want to know.

2. Future Wishlist (The “What Ifs”)

Forget about current limitations. How do you want to control your lights? What capabilities are missing? In what scenarios do you feel our current control logic just isn’t smart enough?

Rewards for Your Insights

20 Points: For every helpful contribution.

80 Bonus Points: For insightful or selected ideas.

Weekly Payouts: Points will be distributed every week for one month.

Aqara points can be redeemed for free Aqara products, Shop coupons and more in the Points Store.

My team and I will be reading every single comment. We’re not here for empty PR—we want to turn your feedback into actual product improvements.

Looking forward to reading your thoughts below. The floor is yours!

DEChrisE · March 2, 2026, 12:33pm

Hi @Jooooa ! I really would love to see the first MR16 / GU5.3 bulb with Matter from Aqara -
I don’t know any brand which provides a 12V gu5.3 bulb with matter - and zigbee !
So check it out and develop such a bulb!

Also I hope to see more outdoor lights from Aqara - from ambient lights for the garden or additional light spots or a floodlight

vita_juzi · March 2, 2026, 2:50pm

Hi Jooooa, thanks for opening up the floor for feedback and wishes.
T2 bulbs are great products, but I’d like to share some specific feedback (though it may be outside the scope of your team activities).

A little T2 bulbs inconvenience due regions splits by products.
As we know, the region is currently tied to the account level rather than the home level. This creates a hurdle for users with homes in different countries.
With T2 bulbs we have situation, where Country A uses E27 bulbs and Country B uses E26 bulbs.
To avoid the friction of logging in/out to switch regions, I keep both A and B Countries homes under Country A region. This means I can’t add local E26 bulbs via Zigbee in Country B home because the account is set to Country A.
Suggestion 1: Changing backend architecture so the Region can be set per Home level instead of the Account level, this would allow to support the specific hardware available at each physical location, also no more re-logins or separate accounts.
Suggestion 2: Consolidating of the T2 bulbs on servers.
For example while having those A and B country separations. I noticed that Country C’s server allows users to add both E26 and E27 T2 bulbs. While the this compatibility is great, it can be too much of T2 bulbs, and might be worth consolidating the list to make it less “noisy” and having just T2 Thread and T2 Zigbee bulb choice.

Edited:
Though this post about software feedback, seeing that many mentioning requests for new hardware, I’ll put my wish too.

Please bring Ceiling Lamp V1 Variations to international market

absent · March 2, 2026, 3:53pm

Thanks for the shout out.

In no particular order, a few points I put down on the way home from work. I’m sure I’ll come up with some more soon.

• Published documentation on manufacturer specific ZigBee cluster attributes, this would be incredibly useful for the open source community. I understand the want to protect company IP but they’re inevitably going to be reverse engineered anyway, I spent way too much time pulling apart packet captures to figure out stuff like how segment pattern encoding worked. There’s a huge market out there that are never going to buy into the Aqara Home hub eco-system but would still by the hardware if their full features could be used with other systems, and the Matter standard really isn’t mature enough yet to do the more interesting things with lights. From a corporate point the cost of officially supporting third-party systems might be difficult to justify, particularly in regard to customer support issues, but opening up the hardware more to assist independent community developments could be a good middle-ground.

• The lights should full support all the standard Zigbee 3.0 genLevelCtrl attributes, e.g. T1 devices and transitions|

• I see Aqara lights as in a mid-market position between the high-end Philips Hue, and the bottom-end Tuya generics, it’s a nice position. The price of kitting out a house with Hue devices can be huge, but they are very good at introducing new features to users existing devices, in both firmware updates and app features, which can make users feel the long term investment more worth it. I think this is where Aqara falls short, the features feel like they very much stand still once the product launch has come and gone. Giving existing customers something new in a product they bought a year ago gives a very nice feeling for the user and makes them more likely to invest in further Aqara products. Something like new dynamic effects for the T2 bulbs in a firmware update, or a way to make the audio mic on the T1 Strip control other lights.

• The app colour pickers, Aqara rightfully tout the colour accuracy of their lights but trying to pick a very specific colour in the Aqara app is a pain. When trying to figure out how the colour encoding worked I needed to repeatedly pick specific colour values, like pure blue, to see how they came out in the Zigbee packets. Trying to hit exactly #0000ff or #ff00ff and such with the colour picker was a real task. A simple text input option would have saved so much time.

• Aqara don’t make bulbs for every scenario e.g E14 bulbs, allow other standard Zigbee/Matter bulbs to be connected directly to an Aqara hub.

• Publish the server URLs of firmware images

• A T1M/T1 Strip segment gradient creator was one of the first things I felt missing from the Aqara app and put in the Advanced Lighting HA integration, it would be a nice useful addition to the Aqara app.

• Segment zone creation, particularly for T1 Strip, e.g. Kitchen cabinets = segments 10,11,12,16,17,18

• A new T2 Strip would a great addition. COB strip with individually addressable LEDs, brightness and colour. The T1 is rather behind in the LED strip market now.

absent · March 2, 2026, 5:11pm

And is the V1 Skylight being launched outside of China?

gafich10 · March 2, 2026, 6:03pm

Hello, for me, currently, the global Aqara equipment lacks lamps similar to T1M with higher power, 40 watts is not enough for a larger room. This also applies to the design of the lamps (ceiling). I am looking forward to expanding this line of lamps for the global version.

mikkelgraverjensen · March 2, 2026, 6:59pm

Dear @Jooooa

Thank you for reaching out to the community.

Firstly we need bulbs with more light than the current bulbs. For larger room 40-50Watt output is simply too low. Also some of the designer lamps (like Louis Poulsen / PH lamps) needs around 100Watt bulbs to actually give the needed light, so a more powerful bulb would make sense.

One low hanging fruit would be to make bulbs that fit the E14 bulbs (like many og your competitors have).

Another possibility could be to make a floodlight lamp for outside use as well.

I would also love a LED strip where you actually can’t see the LED diodes so it would look a little more high end.

Hope some of these suggestions would be usable.

sendox427 · March 2, 2026, 10:11pm

I would like to see more integration with other lights like Nanoleaf, Govee and so on. I also would like matter settings to actual work when a matter RGB led light is added to Aqara hub. A lot of times it won’t let you change the colors or let you pick certain white light temperatures or use them in automations. I also would like to see you guys make more RGB led lights. So I can do creative Aqara automations like my example below. But I really would like Aqara to make indoor and outdoor RGB LED lights like what you see in my videos below

sendox427 · March 2, 2026, 10:21pm

I also want to see them make indoor and outdoor led lights. Like some led pathway lights, garden lights and flood lights.

Jooooa · March 3, 2026, 2:28am

Regarding the MR16 bulb, I think that topic has been addressed before.
But regarding your interest in outdoor ambient lighting, point taken! We appreciate the feedback.

Jooooa · March 3, 2026, 2:29am

Wow, looks amazing! I’m a huge fan of this installation.

Jooooa · March 3, 2026, 3:16am

Thanks for the valuable suggestion! Regarding the cross-region scenario you described, we will definitely be discussing this internally.
To everyone else reading: If you are facing similar multi-country/region issues, please chime in below ! Knowing how many of you are affected helps us better assess the priority of this request.

As for your feedback on the hardware listing, I’ll make sure to pass that along to the relevant colleagues.

Gunblade_Xo1 · March 3, 2026, 3:40am

Hey @Jooooa!

More of a comment on hardware! Would love to see the Aqara E26 lights come bundled as a 3 or 4 pack similar to other brands.

Hint :

Thanks!
–Logan La Vigne

Jooooa · March 3, 2026, 4:08am

I have read and re-read your post—thank you. This feedback is critical for Aqara.

regarding your points:
Open APIs & Color Selection: These are currently under high-priority evaluation .
Hardware: I will ensure this gets to the right hardware teams.
We are also keeping the rest of your feedback under active review .

It’s incredibly exciting to see such dedicated experts focusing on Aqara lighting. Having users like you is exactly what drives us forward!

Stian · March 3, 2026, 7:05am

Aqara needs a wider selection of smart light bulbs such as E14, E27, spotlights, etc., but also more devices to control the lights in the house. Wireless dimmers, double relays, dimmer relays, wireless switches, double wall sockets, etc., here Aqara must also follow up. We in Norway mostly use the Gira system, for example I am going to replace it with an Aqara H2 unit, there are no wireless devices that fit (single and double). Many also have stupid lights that they want to turn on/off. Need an offer for double sockets or a smaller relay for two outlets. Then it will be easier for people to change or upgrade. Use many Aqara and Hue lights daily, but control them via Siri.

DMONK · March 3, 2026, 7:26am

请统一APP上智能灯、驱动、灯组的UI界面，目前的控制界面很难精确的调节到目标色温

siobhanellis · March 3, 2026, 11:27am

I’d like to see Matter over Thread bulbs/globes. Specifically E14 size… although I accept that there is some significant competition with Ikea joining the Matter market.

siobhanellis · March 3, 2026, 11:29am

Whilst you obviously want to differentiate your physical products, Aqara also promotes its hubs as a Matter Controller (e.g. the M3). Keeping your hub up to date and documenting what you have delivered with the Matter spec would be great. See if you can control other Matter bulbs/globes too (I use my switch to turn on smart bulbs)

Don’t ever forget that we want to do things manually that we can with the phone or automatically. Visitors or technophobes may be in the house.