Shelly at IFA 2026: ThreadLink, a Matter wall panel, and a EUR 39.90 camera

Shelly spent the first week of September announcing more than it usually does in a quarter: a firmware called ThreadLink that turns the Thread radio in its Gen4 devices into a full IP network connection, a Wall Display firmware that makes the panel a Matter controller and a Matter device at once, and a camera, which Shelly calls its entry into a new product category. Two of those three change how a local house gets wired.

Short version: ThreadLink is the interesting one, and it is not shipping yet. It lets a Gen4 relay run Matter, Shelly’s own API and Shelly Cloud over Thread, with device-to-device scenes that keep working when the internet and the Wi-Fi are both down, and Shelly’s own “approximately 3 month” estimate, given on September 3, points at early December. Wall Display firmware 2.8.0 is the one you can use today: it makes the panel commission and drive Matter devices from any brand locally, and hands its own relay and thermostat to Home Assistant over Matter. It reached the stable channel on October 6 as 2.8.1, and the current stable build is 2.8.3. The camera is a EUR 39.90 indoor unit with RTSP, a microSD slot and a section in Home Assistant’s own Shelly docs. Nothing here is worth buying today. Two things are worth planning around.

What was announced

Those were announcements with no product pages when I wrote this. Three have since gone on sale in Europe at the prices above, all in stock on October 6, and the Wall Display X1i has no US listing at all. I haven’t used any of them, so there is still nothing here I can recommend; they belong in their own pieces.

What stays local, and what doesn’t

ThreadLink

Most Thread devices use Thread for one job: Matter, and nothing else. Anything a vendor wants beyond the Matter data model goes over Wi-Fi, which means a second radio. ThreadLink drops that split. Shelly treats the Thread mesh as what it already is, an IPv6 network, and runs IPv6 with 6LoWPAN, UDP and TCP across it. Three things then ride on top:

• Matter, for Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, SmartThings and Home Assistant.
• The Shelly RPC API, so scenes and interlocks execute peer to peer inside the mesh.
• Shelly Cloud, reaching the internet through NAT64 at the border router, so remote access works with no Wi-Fi credentials stored on the device.

One detail decides how you read that. ThreadLink is a separate firmware image, and Shelly says customers choose per device whether it runs the standard Wi-Fi firmware or ThreadLink. It is the same either/or arrangement as the Gen4 Zigbee firmware: one radio, one job at a time. A Gen4 relay does not run Wi-Fi and Thread together, and nothing in the announcement changes that.

For a Home Assistant house the appeal is the part that survives an outage, since scenes running inside the mesh do not care whether your router is up. What I want to see first is the “dedicated module” Shelly says will bring the full feature set into Home Assistant. The Shelly integration today is local push and covers all four generations, and its docs say nothing about Thread. Whether that module is a change to it or a separate component is not stated.

Wall Display 2.8.0

This one touches something I own. I run a Wall Display XL, it drives a Home Assistant dashboard, and it is slow. Its catalog card here predates the announcement and still shows Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with no Matter, which is what 2.8.0 changes.

The panel becomes a Matter controller: you type a device’s Matter setup code into the screen, it commissions, appears as a tile beside the Shelly devices, and can be driven from local scenes and scripts on the panel.

It also becomes a Matter device, so Home Assistant sees its relay outputs as switches, a fitted dimmer supply as a dimmable light, and a paired Blu H&T as temperature and humidity. Shelly says all of that runs locally on the panel at no cost, on the open-source Matter stack, and that the cloud parts, app access from anywhere, history and cross-home scenes, are a Shelly Premium feature it said would follow later in September. That half has not arrived; Shelly’s changelog still marks it “TBA”.

Two limits worth knowing. The panel is not a Thread border router; Shelly says Thread devices still need their own, and you add them using the setup code their hub hands out. And a relay the panel’s own room thermostat is driving is never offered to an outside system as a switch.

The camera

The specification reads better than the price suggests: RTSP for a local stream into any NVR, a microSD slot up to 512 GB, MQTT, WebSocket, scripting, a local web interface, and a privacy mode that cuts recording, microphone and speaker. Home Assistant’s Shelly docs already carry a Shelly Camera section, creating one camera entity per stream once you enable RTSP streaming in the device’s own web panel. Shelly names Frigate as a supported platform.

The cloud sits beside that rather than in front of it. Storage in Shelly’s cloud is optional, priced on the product page at EUR 3.99 a month for one camera, or EUR 6.99, EUR 10.99 and EUR 14.99 for three, six and ten.

The object recognition is where I stop trusting the marketing: the press release says the camera supports local AI models, while the knowledge base and the store page both call the recognition cloud-based and do not mention local models. Until Shelly reconciles those, treat it as a good local RTSP source with cloud smarts bolted on.

Buy, wait or ignore

Home Assistant house. Wait on one of the two. Do not buy a Gen4 device today because of ThreadLink, since Shelly has not said which models are eligible and the firmware is months out. If you own a Wall Display in the supported list, the Matter build is stable now, 2.8.3, with nothing left on the beta channel, so there is no longer a reason to wait before you judge what it offers Home Assistant over Matter.

Apple Home or Google Home house. The Wall Display update reads differently for you. A panel that is both a Matter controller and a Matter device puts its relay and thermostat into your ecosystem without a bridge. Shelly’s pitch beyond that is that you can write your own automations on the panel, where Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa and SmartThings offer the ones their maker built. Ignore ThreadLink for now; it changes nothing you can see until the firmware exists.

Budget buyer. A EUR 39.90 camera with RTSP and an SD card is a strong number against anything subscription-shaped. Buy one and point it at Frigate if you want an indoor camera in Europe, where both colours are in stock. The US store has since put a price on it, $39.90, but both colours read out of stock there on October 5, so there is still nothing to buy.

Does this change my picks?

Not today. Three things get a second look.

• Wall Display XL. My review stands, verdict included. The catalog entry still shows no Matter and now needs updating, because 2.8.0 shipped on October 6 and Matter changes what the panel is for.
• Local in-wall relays and Shelly versus Sonoff. Both rate the Gen4 relays on a Wi-Fi-or-Zigbee choice. If ThreadLink ships for those models it becomes a three-way choice, and a relay that keeps running scenes through an outage is a different product from a Wi-Fi one. That is a rewrite waiting on a firmware.
• Local security cameras. The Shelly Camera is not in the catalog and I haven’t run it. On paper it belongs in that comparison. The US price is now posted, $39.90, but I still want a unit that actually ships in the US and a straight answer on where the object recognition runs before I add it.

For what ThreadLink is, which border router it needs and how it reaches Home Assistant, see Shelly ThreadLink explained.