The Connectivity Standards Alliance published a few days ago the final version of the smart home protocol, which had been in development for years and brings together almost all the major players in the sector.
It is no exaggeration to say that Matter was highly anticipated, as it carries the hopes of many. And for good reason: it is meant to serve as a bridge between all compatible devices, either because they will have been designed with this protocol or because they will have been updated to take advantage of it.
This will indeed be the case at Amazon, where a majority of devices will be compatible very soon. An Alexa Connect kit for Matter will also be made available. At Apple, it is iOS version 16.1 — currently in beta — that will bring support for the protocol.
At Philips, the entire Hue range will also be compatible. This means products from different brands will be able to communicate with each other via Matter. >This is, in fact, the whole point of this new standard.
Note that for the moment, the CSA has not published any official announcement. As soon as it does, we should see a flood of press releases from all the manufacturers involved.
After the publication of the code for the final 1.0 release of the home automation protocol, it was clear the official announcement would not be long in coming. It’s now done, and the Connectivity Standards Alliance – formerly Zigbee Alliance – seems very proud of the result.
It recalls that this is the culmination of a major effort that brought together 550 companies selling home automation products, including several giants such as Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Google, Philips and SmartThings. With this announcement a certification program is also made official, along with the necessary tools and the SDK (software development kit).
Of all the companies that participated in the development of the standard, more than 280 put their technologies on the table so that Matter can take all these companies into account. The Wi-Fi Alliance and the Thread Group also participated in its design.
Companies interested in certifying their products can turn to the eight test laboratories currently ready for Matter: Allion Labs, Bureau Veritas, Dekra, Element, Eurofins Digital Testing, Granite River Labs, TUV Rheinland and UL Solutions.
As a reminder, Matter is not an additional protocol, but a technology designed by the entire industry so that connected devices can communicate with each other. In the weeks and months to come, many updates will be rolled out so that the devices concerned can communicate.
What’s impressive (if I understand correctly) is that the current hardware is already compatible. It « just » requires pushing updates to support this new protocol.
Honestly, I’m not surprised given the companies that were involved in creating Mater!
And that’s for the best, it should allow for a well-maintained library
Another interesting development: the Matter integration in Home Assistant is actually a separate container, a bit like Zigbee2mqtt, but it communicates over WebSockets.
So, essentially, we could very well interface with the HA integration and just write compatibility for their container like we do in the Z2M integration.
Well, it’s all still very young and as for available hardware right now, it’s not great ^^
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