The history of smart home devices has been fragmented, to say the least. Over the past decade, thousands of manufacturers have produced millions of gadgets, each of which communicates over a specific wireless signal like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Zigbee. This makes it difficult to sync and control devices as simple as the best smart lights.
To address this and other issues, the Matter protocol was launched in 2022 to provide a common language for smart home devices. Now, as we reach the halfway point in 2024, Matter has been officially released for almost two years and supports over 41 product categories, from the best smart displays to EV charging stations. Leading smart home hub and device manufacturers such as Amazon, Apple, and Google have updated their smart home ecosystems to support Matter, demonstrating a strong industry commitment.
While Matter has made great strides to become the foundation of smart home environments, it has not yet seen widespread adoption. To understand why implementation has taken so long and what it will take to expand its reach, we spoke with technical leaders from Matter's founding team, the Connectivity Standards Alliance, industry analysts, and manufacturers who are using Matter.
what happened?
(Image courtesy of Google)
Formerly known as ChIP (Connected Home Over IP), Matter is a unified connectivity standard developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), whose members include some of the biggest names in the smart home industry, including Apple, Google, Amazon and the Zigbee Alliance.
The protocol aims to ensure reliable, secure, and seamless communication between smart home devices, regardless of brand or platform. It works over Wi-Fi, Thread, and Bluetooth, so it can be added to any device that supports any of these protocols.
Material Promises
(Image courtesy of Tom's Guide)
A key benefit of Matter is that it uses a standardized IP-based communications protocol, allowing devices from different manufacturers to work together seamlessly without the need for multiple physical hubs or apps. Previously, you had to buy platform-specific devices like smart lights or smart thermostats that “work with Alexa or HomeKit,” leaving you with less freedom of choice.
Matter allows you to pair and use devices across the entire ecosystem, giving you more choice and control and ensuring you're not “tied” to one platform. In fact, the multi-access approach means something like a smart lock can be paired across different platforms simultaneously.
Eve was one of the largest companies to fully commit to the protocol in early 2019. The additional development time enabled the company to offer one of the largest lineups of Matter-enabled products.
Prior to Matter, Eve products were only compatible with HomeKit. “While we're grateful for the success Eve has had, Eve is no longer limited to HomeKit,” said Jerome Gackel, CEO of Eve Systems. “Eve will remain uncompromisingly the privacy-first choice for smart home consumers, and through Matter we can open the door to millions more potential customers.”
Question: What is the challenge?
(Image courtesy of Shutterstock)
So if Matter is supposed to be a panacea for all your smart home woes, why has it taken so long to adopt and why are some companies, like Belkin's WeMo brand, pulling away from it entirely?
The real problem is that Matter needs more time. “Engineering cycles run at different speeds,” says Chris LaPré, technical lead at the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the founding organization of Matter. “QA cycles, roadmaps, and engineering decisions all rely on outside support and are determined by the complexity of the device type. A smart thermostat took longer than a smart plug or lightbulb because it required more testing and functional QA.”
Matter poses technical hurdles for devices with limited processing power or older hardware, and some businesses may find the resource investment required to integrate and authenticate their devices with Matter is not worth the expected return, especially if the current ecosystem already works well for them.
(Image courtesy of Shutterstock)
“Companies can cheaply build their own chips with small chip, packet and encryption capabilities into their devices,” Lapres says. “Now, to meet the standard, you have to support a much wider range of features. The memory requirements of the standard are larger, and you no longer have to meet a simple checklist of requirements to move a product from engineering to market.”
While big tech companies like Amazon and Samsung can absorb the costs by pioneering hardware with large teams, it's hard for smaller companies and startups to get new devices to market quickly. While other smart home brands continued business as usual with an eye on the far-off future of the smart home, Eve bet on its own success.
The reason Eve has so many products out there today is because they were excited about CHiP (later to be known as Matter) when it was officially announced in 2019. The Eve team immediately got to work future-proofing their growing product line, starting with migrating all Bluetooth-based products to the new Thread mesh networking protocol.
“All the major vendors support Matter, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Samsung,” says Avi Greengart, founder of Techsponential. “Of course, even if everyone agrees that this is necessary (and they do), making it work is complicated, and we're in the most difficult phase of the transition. The Matter standard is being rolled out, and there are products that work with it now, but not all types of products are supported, and you may already have many products in your home that don't work with Matter.”
What are your prospects for Matter?
(Image courtesy of Shutterstock)
Adoption of Matter has been slow but steady since its official release in late 2022. To date, there are over 1,400 new Matter-certified devices in the market.
Greengart explains that there are three stages of adoption of a standard: the hype when it's first announced, the disappointment of partial compatibility during the first stages of the rollout, and finally as it's implemented, the rough edges are smoothed out, and it becomes something to be taken for granted. “We're in phase two,” Greengart says. “This will continue for a few more years as new device types are added to Matter (e.g., appliances, security cameras), device manufacturers produce more Matter-compatible devices in existing categories (e.g., thermostats, light switches), and Matter hubs are built into existing devices (e.g., TVs, broadband routers).”
Matter's latest 1.3 update added support for home appliances, EV chargers, and energy monitoring, but it still doesn't support several key smart home device categories, including cameras, routers, sprinklers, and home health equipment.
Matter will continue to evolve and integrate with a wider variety of smart home devices, but its success will also depend on how well it convinces both consumers and manufacturers of its value. If successful, it could indeed become a global standard. It's just a matter of time.