Review: Aqara Hub M3
If you’re someone who has a lot of smart home gear, then the Aqua Hub M3 is something that you might be looking into to add to your smart home setup. The reason being that this hub does the following:
- It’s a Matter controller that can work with non-Aqara Matter smart home devices
- It’s a Thread border router
- It has a two-way 360° infrared blaster that can be exposed to your smart home ecosystem to control devices that support IR control
- It of course supports the Zigbee protocol
The first two items might be of value if you don’t already have a Matter controller or a Thread border router in whatever home ecosystem you are in. HomeKit users won’t care about this because if you have a HomePod or a recent AppleTV, you get Matter and Thread support in those devices. Which is why I won’t be testing that functionality as I review this product. On top of that, Aqara says that only a handful of Matter-compatible lights, switches, and thermostats are officially supported. And from what I can figure out, the same appears to be true for Thread devices. So that might limit the use cases that this hub can be used in. But having said that, if you do have devices that this hub supports, or Aqara broadens the support for Matter and Thread devices, this could be the “one hub to rule them all” as all your smart home devices could be run through this hub. The IR blaster could be useful for controlling non “smart” devices. But my use case doesn’t include any such devices. So I didn’t test that either.
Now let’s look at the Aqara Hub M3 hub:
If you compare this to the Aqara M1S Hub for example, it looks way better. Because it is a black square it doesn’t stand out. And the big ring light that was present in the M1S is gone in favour of a single LED on the front. Also included are a mounting bracket and a USB-C to USB-A cable. Not pictured are a set of screws for the mounting bracket as well as documentation.
One cool thing is that this can be powered by USB-C or by PoE. Which means in the case of the latter a single ethernet cable can supply data as well as power for a clean setup. Unless you use USB-C as that requires you to bring your own power adapter to the party. That’s a bit of a #Fail. But if you have a UPS that supports USB, you could power it that way I suppose.
Setting this up was….. Problematic. You need the Aqara app to start the setup process. That went well and guided me through getting the device into the app and updating the firmware. But things went off the rails when I tried to use the Aqara app’s ability to migrate from one hub to another. By migration I mean that if you have an old Aqara hub with a bunch of devices and automations, it will move those over to the M3. In my case, I wanted to move a door sensor with related automations over to the M3. But I tried twice and waited 10 minutes before it failed each time. I then started to troubleshoot by rebooting the M3 hub. At that point, I was prompted for a firmware update in the Aqara app that I promptly did. Why it didn’t prompt me to update to that firmware when I first set the hub up I don’t know. But after I did that the migration process worked and took only a minute. After doing some quick testing, I found that everything worked fine. Though it didn’t “feel” any faster than the M1S that it was replacing.
Next up was to delete the old hub from the Home app, which was painless, and add the new M3, which again didn’t go to plan. There is a HomeKit barcode on the back of the hub, and I tried to use that to add the M3 hub via the Home app on my iPhone.
#Fail.
Next up I tried to use the Aqara app to add the M3 hub to HomeKit.
#Fail.
I rebooted the hub and added it via the HomeKit barcode.
#Success
The other thing that I had to do is to add back all the notifications for things like doors opening and closing in HomeKit, along with setting up my HomeKit scenes to include the M3 as that understandably isn’t part of the migration process.
Total time invested: 45 Minutes
Given that this is supposed to be a consumer device, which means that it should be easy to set up to make sure that said consumers don’t flood a tech support line looking for help, these sorts of glitches and oddities should be the exception and not the rule. But in this case, they seem to be the rule. Which is of course bad.
Some other notes:
- The M3 features 8GB of encrypted local storage for device lists, configuration parameters and automation data. Which means that if you have no Internet connection, your automations should still work.
- The M3 claims to have a 95dB speaker, but in my testing, I could only register a max of 87dB. But that’s useful enough for an alarm system, which is how I am using this.
- You can set the M3 up with one or more Aqara hubs to create a more resilient and efficient setup. In other words if one fails, another can take over.
- From a WiFi perspective, it supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. I set the hub up on the latter to take one more device off of the 2.4 GHz band as I want to have as few devices on 2.4 GHz as possible on my WiFi network.
Here’s the bottom line. With all the glitches that I came across, it makes the Aqara Hub M3 a bit difficult to recommend. If Aqara can sort out these issues, that would likely make it a worthy upgrade for existing Aqara owners. For new owners, the M3 is only worth looking at if you need a Matter controller or a Thread border router. That won’t be the case for HomeKit users. But for other home ecosystems, it is worth looking at as long as you have Thread or Matter devices that the hub plays nice with. This hub goes for $169 CAD on Amazon. It’s worth a look if you have a use case for this hub, and you’re willing to deal with the bugs and oddities that seem to be part of the deal at the time of writing this review.
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