The convenience of choosing your smart home app and all devices working nicely is finally here..
You might have surely faced this issue with smart home devices that they are not easy to setup, sometimes lack cross platform compatibility or just have to keep a dozen of apps for every product you buy which doesn't seem to be the ideal experience what manufacturers what you to go through.
These days, we can take an ordinary inanimate object, such as a light bulb, and give it new high-tech capabilities by equipping it with a computer chip. As Smart home devices become increasingly popular, manufacturers are working to improve compatibility and set up. The lack of an industry standard made smart home set up more complex than it needed to be since different companies used various standards.
What is Matter?
Matter, is the next-generation smart home standard which is open source and aimed to solve this pain points whilst bringing connecting, setting up and managing IoT devices a more seamless and intuitive process for all it's customers.
Matter is a new smart home standard conceived by Project Connected Home Over IP (Project Chip) in 2019. It's now maintained by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), formerly known as the Zigbee Alliance. The standard is royalty-free and encourages interoperability between devices and platforms.
The CSA brought many of the biggest smart home players on board with Matter, including Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings. Getting every company on the same page to support Matter is no small feat. However, it's a significant step toward a better smart home experience.
Device manufacturers need to comply with the Matter standard to ensure their devices are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and others. For folks building a smart home, Matter theoretically lets you buy any device and use the voice assistant or platform you prefer to control it (yes, you should be able to use different voice assistants to talk to the same product).
For example, you'll be able to buy a Matter-supported smart bulb and set it up with Apple Homekit, Google Assistant, or Amazon Alexa-without having to worry about compatibility. Right now, some devices already support multiple platforms (like Alexa or Google Assistant), but Matter will expand that platform support and make setting up your new devices faster and easier.
Matter is the solution to those pain points of cross-compatibility issues and having a uniform setup experience
What will Matter work with at the moment?
Many devices have been launched with the hardware required and companies were waiting on the Matter 1.0 launch so that they can enable the feature via a OTA firmware update. Amazon has announced that 17 Alexa devices will start getting matter support starting with Alexa Echo dot gen 4 in the first quater of 2023.
The first specification, or Matter 1.0, covers only certain categories of devices, including:
- Light bulbs and switches
- Smart plugs
- Smart locks
- Safety and security sensors
- Media devices including TVs
- Smart blinds and shades
- Garage door controllers
- Thermostats
- HVAC controllers
Further versions will also have support for doorbells, robot vaccums, security cameras.
Thread, a cherry on top of Matter standards
Thread is a low-power mesh network protocol that will soon become the backbone of smart connected home
Thread is a wireless protocol specifically built for IoT devices. It's designed to make them work faster, have fewer points of failure, use less power, and communicate with each other more seamlessly.
A low-power, low-bandwidth mesh networking protocol that uses the 802.15.4 radio technology, Thread is similar to existing smart home protocols Zigbee and Z-Wave. But unlike them, it doesn't need a central hub or bridge. Instead, Thread devices can talk directly to each other. By cutting out the middle man, Thread can be faster, especially over large networks.
Also, unlike the other low-powered smart home protocols, Thread is internet protocol (IP)-based, meaning it can directly connect to any other IP-based device, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and Wi-Fi routers. "What makes it unique is that it was built on IP," says Neidig. "We are bringing the same protocol that the internet runs on to run on small devices."
Security and Privacy
The Matter standards and API are open source and freely available on GitHub. The Matter smart home standard also addresses another common pain point with current IoT devices: requiring a constant internet connection. IoT devices have previously relied exclusively on the cloud for everything, making them useless when you lose connection to the internet.
Matter allows your devices to work offline without requiring continuous access to the cloud. Less reliance on the cloud also means increased security for your devices, making Matter even more beneficial. The goal is to combine these new features to give you the best smart home experience possible.
Next time now you are buying any new smart home device, do look out for Matter support which will make it future proof. Matter over Thread will be an added advantage feature which would help other Matter enabled devices in your home to communicate without directly connecting to the wifi router.
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, the next generation of IoT devices running under the Matter-certified brand looks to bring the future smart homes to the present day.
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