I am a long-term Home Assistant (HA) user who has recently decided to migrate to Matter over Thread as my choice to move away from proprietary lock-ins. I run my HA on a Raspberry Pi 4. I invested in upgrading my ZBT-1 running Zigbee to a ZBT-2 configured as a Thread Border Router. I just received a significant purchase of IKEA Kajplats Matter bulbs to replace my existing proprietary bulbs. When attempting to configure the first one, I found that I had to use the HA companion app on my phone. This worked up to the point of scanning for and finding the first bulb I tried to add. At that time I was advised that my phone did not support the Thread router because it was an older phone running Android 12. Apparently Thread requires version 13 or higher. Working with OpenCode in HA, I explored several workarounds and finally landing on buying a new phone. As you might imagine, this was a very unsettling sequence of events. I understand why this is the way it works, but have never seen this restriction identified. Please be advised.
There’s been a lot of talk here about the potential issues surrounding the “commissioning” of Matter devices. Specifically, this may not entirely achieve your goal of getting away from proprietary lock-ins. I won’t reiterate all that’s been said, but I encourage you to read up on this.
You can also (and i always recommend this) add/commission new devices completely without any phone simply by using possibly pre-existing BLE proxies in your HA System or a cheap USB Bluetooth Dongle for under 10€/Dollar and thus keeping Google and Apple out of the pairing process.
You dont need a phone, just a Bluetooth device for the pairing process to send the Thread credentials to the Matter Device.
Look here:
Your Raspberry Pi4 should have Bluetooth built in, so with the latest Matter Server App Version you could have used the BLE proxy option. But a shiny new phone might work as well. Sorry for that … 