The perfect smart home anticipates your needs and responds instantly to commands. You don’t have to open a separate app for each device or remember the exact combination of voice command and voice assistant to play the latest episode of your favorite podcast on your nearest speaker. Competing smart home standards make your devices unnecessarily complicated. It’s just not quite… well, smart.
Tech giants are trying to get around the standards by offering voice assistants as a top-level control layer, but Alexa can’t communicate with Google Assistant or Siri or control Google or Apple devices, or vice versa. (So far, no ecosystem has created all the best devices.) But these compatibility issues may soon be resolved. Formerly known as Project CHIP (Connecting the Home Over IP), the open source interoperability standard called Matter is finally here. Some of the biggest tech companies like Amazon, Apple and Google have already signed on, meaning that seamless integration could finally be achievable.
Update October 2022: Added news about the release of the Matter 1.0 specification, the certification program, and some other details.
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Matter promises to ensure the normal functioning of various devices and ecosystems. Device manufacturers must adhere to the Matter standard in order for their devices to be compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and more. For people building smart homes, Matter could theoretically let you buy any device and control it with your favorite voice assistant or platform (yes, you should be able to use a different voice assistant to communicate with the same product).
For example, you can buy a Matter-enabled smart light bulb and set it up with Apple Homekit, Google Assistant, or Amazon Alexa without worrying about compatibility. Currently, some devices already support multiple platforms (such as Alexa or Google Assistant), but Matter will expand support for this platform and make it easier for you to set up new devices.
The first protocol runs on top of the Wi-Fi and Thread network layers and uses Bluetooth Low Energy to configure the device. While it will support multiple platforms, you’ll have to choose which voice assistants and apps to use – there’s no central app or Matter assistant. In general, you can expect your smart home devices to respond to you faster.
The Connectivity Standards Alliance (or CSA, formerly the Zigbee Alliance) supports the Matter standard. What sets it apart is the breadth of its membership (over 550 technology companies), its willingness to embrace and combine different technologies, and the fact that it is an open source project. Now that the Software Development Kit (SDK) is ready, interested companies can use it for free to integrate their devices into the Matter ecosystem.
Born into the Zigbee Alliance, we laid a solid foundation for Matter. Bringing the major smart home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings) together at the same table is a big achievement. The vision of Matter’s full and seamless adoption is optimistic, but it has sparked a wave of enthusiasm as a number of smart home brands have already signed up, including August, Schlage and Yale in smart locks, Belkin, Cync, GE in smart lighting Lighting, Sengled, Signify ( Philips Hue) and Nanoleaf, as well as others such as Arlo, Comcast, Eve, TP-Link and LG. Matter has over 280 member companies.
The substance has been around for many years. The first release was originally scheduled for late 2020, but was pushed back to the following year, renamed Matter, and then advertised as a summer release. After another delay, the Matter 1.0 specification and certification process is finally ready. Provide SDK, tools and test cases, and open 8 authorized testing laboratories for product certification. Essentially, this means you can expect Matter-enabled smart home devices to go on sale as early as October 2022 after certification.
The CSA said the latest delay was to accommodate more devices and platforms and ensure they work seamlessly with each other ahead of launch. Over 130 devices and sensors are being certified across 16 development platforms (operating systems and chipsets), and you can expect more to come soon.
The road to smart home nirvana has been paved by various standards such as Zigbee, Z-Wave, Samsung SmartThings, Wi-Fi HaLow and Insteon, just to name a few. These and other agreements will continue to exist and function. Google has implemented its Thread and Weave technologies in Matter. The new standard also adopts Wi-Fi and Ethernet standards and uses Bluetooth LE to configure the device.
Substance is not a single technology and must evolve and improve over time. It does not cover every possible use case for every device and scenario, so other standards will continue to evolve. The more platforms and standards that integrate with Matter, the more likely it is to succeed, but the more difficult it is to get it to work smoothly.
Some devices will work with Matter after a firmware update. Others are never compatible. There are no easy answers here. Many devices that currently use Thread, Z-Wave, or Zigbee should be able to use Matter, but there is no guarantee that they will receive the update. Your best bet is to contact the manufacturer for your specific device and future support.
More recent specifications may cover security cameras and doorbells, robotic vacuum cleaners, and other devices.
Some brands such as Philips Hue are updating their hubs to be compatible with Matter. This is a way to get around incompatibility issues with older hardware. Upgrading your hubs to use the new Matter standard will allow you to connect legacy systems, proving standards can coexist. But to fully exploit Matter’s potential benefits, new equipment is often required. Once you accept the system, you can get rid of the hub completely.
The underlying Thread technology in Matter allows devices such as smart speakers or lights to act as thread routers and create a mesh network over which data can flow, increasing range and reliability. Unlike traditional smart home hubs, these flow routers cannot see what is going on inside the packets they exchange. Data can be securely transferred from end to end over a network of devices from different manufacturers.
Security and privacy concerns often come up in smart home scenarios. The substance is designed to be safe, but we won’t know how safe until it plays a role in the real world. The CSA has published a set of security and privacy principles and plans to use distributed ledger technology and public key infrastructure for device authentication. This is to ensure that people connect genuine, certified, and up-to-date devices to their homes and networks. Data collection and sharing will continue to be between you and the device manufacturer or platform provider.
Matter devices basically connect directly to the internet, until you’re left with just a hub for protection. This makes them potentially more vulnerable to hackers and malware. But Matter also offers local control, so commands from your phone or smart display don’t have to go through a cloud server. It can be delivered directly to devices on your home network.
While large platform vendors may see the benefits of common standards, they will not give full control of their hardware to competitors. There will be a gap between the walled garden ecosystem and the functionality of Matter. Manufacturers will also retain the exclusivity of some features.
For example, you can use Google Assistant voice commands to turn your Apple device on or off, but you must use Siri or the Apple app to adjust certain settings or access advanced features. Manufacturers who have signed Matter are not required to implement the entire specification, so the level of support may vary.
Matter is seen as a panacea for the smart home, but only time will tell. Few innovations make it all work. But there is potential value in seeing the Matter logo on a device and knowing that it will work with an existing smart home setup, especially in homes with iPhones, Android phones, and Alexa devices. The freedom to mix and match your devices and voice assistants is enticing.
Nobody wants to choose a device based on compatibility. We want to choose a device with the best feature set, the highest quality, and the design we want. Hopefully Matter will make it easier.
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Post time: Nov-16-2022
