Matter (WiFi) bulbs transition very slowly after 2024.3.0

Hi,

Upgraded to 2024.3.0 [EDIT: and just now to 2024.3.1], and I noticed that my wifi Matter bulbs (two different manufacturers, Tapo and Leedarson) now take a VERY long time to change brightness. Turning them on or off works as expected (they quickly turn on), but changing an already-on bulb’s brightness is very slow. The Leedarson bulb is maybe 30% per second, but the Tapo is less than 5% per second (i.e., it takes >20s to go from 1% to 100%).

This shows up in the UI as slightly funny behavior — if the light is at 1% and I click on 100%, the slider immediately jumps back down to 1% and slowly climbs back up. The same behavior happens if I use Android’s “Device Control” to change the bulbs — I drag the slider to 100% and then it pops back to 1% and slowly creeps up.

I assume this is related to the note in the changelog:

The only entity I see is the bulb (on/off, color/colortemp, brightness — there is no Transition option that I see). I tried re-interviewing devices in the hopes that a Transition option would appear but no luck. I just now (as of posting this) updated my Matter server as well, but that hasn’t changed anything.

Any tips? Thanks! I’m running both Matter server and HA in Docker.

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I rolled back to 2024.2.2 and verified that it works as expected: changing from e.g. 100% brightness to 1% brightness is zippy. (I was wondering if maybe a firmware update had been applied to my Matter bulbs, or something else unrelated to HA.)

So this slow transition “regression” (quotes because I’m not sure if it’s a bug or a feature…) seems to have been introduced sometime between 2024.2.2 → 2023.3.0.

I’m also experiencing this, with Tapo Matter lights, Core 2024.3.1, and Home Assistant OS with the Matter add-on. I upgraded from 2024.2.5 to 2024.3.0, which is when the behavior started.

@bbklopfer I’ve adapted your write-up into an an issue filed with HA Core: Matter (WiFi) bulbs transition very slowly after 2024.3.0 · Issue #113775 · home-assistant/core · GitHub

I’ve documented a work-around here: Matter (WiFi) bulbs transition very slowly after 2024.3.0 · Issue #113775 · home-assistant/core · GitHub

Awesome, thanks @afelds for filing the issue and for the workaround! I’ll give it a try soon.

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6 months later, the default transition time that originated this issue has been removed because vendors of Matter lights still can’t do transitions right.

It’s actually sad because Matter is so feature-rich when it comes to lights but we are going to be stuck in the most basic on/off/brightness/temperature controls. Having to roll back is kind of losing the opportunity to encourage vendors to fix their implementation making the issue more visible.

A chicken and egg situation, vendors don’t do transitions fine, smart home platforms don’t use the feature because it doesn’t work, vendors say smart home platforms don’t use transitions so why bother.