Matter’s plan to save the smart home

The smart home should be a natural evolution of our homes, bringing better appliances, better systems, and better experiences. But so far, it’s been complicated, confusing, and expensive. Walled gardens have stifled innovation as developers focus on getting their devices to work with three or four or more different platforms rather than spending their time creating better products and new features. Consumers spend too much energy figuring out which product works with which and then troubleshooting those connections, before often giving up on the whole thing. This has led to a slower smart home adoption than many expected.To get more news about smart homes, you can visit securamsys.com official website.

What the smart home needs, and has needed for a long time, is a universal connectivity standard — a basic level of common plumbing in our homes for everything to flow through. Just as we chose VHS over Betamax in the ’80s (and Blu-ray over HD-DVD in the early 2000s) for a better home theater experience, so we need to choose a smart home standard.

The problem is there aren’t two or three standards to choose from. There are many, and none of them work very well on their own. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth have all tried and failed to become the primary radio protocol of the smart home. But none have gained enough traction or offered enough flexibility to fit into all corners of the smart home.

Buy a gadget, plug it in, and it will work with the rest of your smart home. Set up that new device with your favorite smart home app, and control it with your voice assistant of choice, no matter who made it. This may sound like some distant smart home nirvana, but this is the promise of Matter. The simple smart home could be just around the corner.

An open-sourced connectivity standard created by over 200 companies, Matter is a communication protocol that leverages existing technologies — Thread, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ethernet — to allow all of your devices to communicate with each other locally, without the need for a cloud.
What makes Matter more than just another smart home standard is momentum; most of the industry is on board. Organized by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (or CSA, formerly the Zigbee Alliance), Matter is being developed by Amazon, Apple, Google / Nest, and Samsung, alongside many other smart home and smart home-adjacent companies, including Lutron, iRobot, Signify (Philips Hue), Ikea, and more.

Driven by a shared need to fix the problems of the smart home, these companies are working together to figure out how to make this standard be the one that sticks. Can Matter finally bring an end to the confusion perfectly encapsulated by Randall Munroe’s classic xkcd “Standards” comic?
This is a Renaissance [for the smart home]” says Tobin Richardson, president and CEO of the CSA. “Most of the industry, if not all the industry have agreed that [Matter] is going to be the way this will happen.” They are seemingly all on board with the fact that Matter is the solution to the smart home’s biggest problems — simplicity, interoperability, reliability, and security.

The final Matter specification, SDK, and certification program arrived in the fall of 2022, and the first Matter-certified devices should come out in December. That’s over a year later than promised when Matter first launched in 2019, but better late than never.If you have already boned up on what Matter is and why it… matters, and you just want to know what devices you can buy and when, head over to our “What matters about Matter” article, where we look at how the different smart home platforms are implementing Matter and which devices are Matter-ready or will be updated to support Matter soon. Otherwise, read on to learn about how Matter is going to fix the smart home.