Photo: Connectivity Standards Alliance
The wait is over for Matter 1.0. The Connectivity Standards Alliance has introduced the cross-platform home-automation standard after lengthy delays.
It is intended to break through the walled silos of Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa and Google Home, allowing accessories from a wide range of companies to communicate. It might finally make smart homes more common… potentially even mainstream.
Why Matter matters
HomeKit is a very capable home automation system. So are Alexa and Google Home. But they all have a significant flaw: an accessory using one can’t talk to products that use the others.
The companies that make home-automation devices accepted that this was a problem, and the result is Matter 1.0.
“What started as a mission to unravel the complexities of connectivity has resulted in Matter, a single, global IP-based protocol that will fundamentally change the IoT,” said Tobin Richardson, President and CEO of the Connectivity Standards Alliance. Matter enables home-automation products from a range of brands and platforms to interoperate.
The CSA includes the heavy hitters needed to accomplish its goal, including Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Google, Signify and SmartThing. There are 280 companies in the trade group.
Matter can communicate over Ethernet, Wi-Fi or the low-power mesh-networking standard Thread. While it’s relatively new, companies have already adopted Thread for their home-automation products, even before the debut of Matter 1.0.
The CSA did not predict when the first accessories using the new standard will reach the market. Apple is building support for it into iOS 16.
Source: Connectivity Standards Alliance
