Hey everyone, just wanted to share a massive architectural win for anyone trying to get the new Nuki Ultra running bridge-free in an Android-centric household.
For months, I was stuck in smart home limbo. I bought an Aqara Hub M3 hoping it would act as my main system layout, but quickly hit a wall: while the M3 is a fine Thread Border Router for its own ecosystem, Aqara doesn’t expose the NAT64 translation layer to third-party devices. Because of this, the “Remote Access via Thread” toggle in the Nuki app would just instantly bounce back to “Off,” because the lock’s IPv6 packets couldn’t bridge out to Nuki’s IPv4 cloud servers.
To bypass this, I was forced into a fragmented compromise—plugging an Apple HomePod Mini into my house purely to act as an unfirewalled NAT64 gateway for my lock.
With the release of the new Google Home Speaker, that layout mess is officially obsolete. Despite early pre-order spec sheets conservatively mentioning Thread 1.3, the hardware officially shipped with full Thread 1.4 support out of the box, meaning a completely open and standardised NAT64 translation engine is active on day one.
I completely disconnected and unplugged the HomePod Mini, left the Aqara M3 to handle its local Zigbee tasks, and booted up the new Google speaker. The automated background credential handshake went through flawlessly via Android Play Services.
The Nuki Ultra found the Thread 1.4 path instantly. Remote access is now running completely natively, bridge-free, with zero cloud lag, and I’ve finally reclaimed my counter space. If you’ve been waiting to consolidate into a single, clean Google mesh setup without losing your Nuki Ultra’s cloud access, this speaker finally delivers the local networking tools we’ve been begging for.
Cheers