Does Matter Matter?
The matter smart home protocol was released this month, November 2022. What does this mean for your home automation? Will your current hub work? Are all of your devices obsolete? We'll run you through what matter is and why it will improve your existing smart home going forward and simplify your life.
What is Matter
Matter is an application layer that sits between your smart devices and the ecosystem that you use to control them. It creates a standard that allows all of your smart devices to talk to each other on your hub. You currently are using a variety of standards to allow your devices to communicate via z wave, zigbee, wifi, bluetooth low energy or a combination of all the above. When you mix and match protocols getting all of your devices to play together nicely.
This new standard should avoid the common problem in the tech world of new standards just adding to the list of many standards (see: xkcd 927) since all of the players in smart home technology worked together to create the standard. Going forward when you see a device with the matter logo you should know that it will work within your smart home seamlessly.
Local Control
One of the biggest pieces of the matter protocol is that all of your matter enabled devices are required to allow for local control. This will allow you to control your smart devices from within your home network and not rely on third party cloud servers. This will allow you to restrict your devices access to outside networks and help limit the amount of data collection that companies can do with your smart home products. You will also be able to control your smart devices when your internet is down provided that you are on the same local network at the time.
Matter in Home Assistant
Home assistant devices will be able to be added for home assistant users like any other. The major benefit of matter in home assistant is that adding support for new devices should be more streamlined and quicker for developers to implement since the application layer will already exist and they won't need to reverse engineer a third party protocol that talks to cloud servers when new devices are released.
Do I Need To Do Anything?
Not yet. The final standard for matter was just released, it will take some time for the ecosystem to fully develop. Smart things users with a v2 hub and newer should already have smart things support as well as HomeKit users with newer iOS devices. Most other smart home ecosystems are currently developing matter based updates and should be releasing soon.
The one thing you should do is when buying new devices in the future look for the matter logo. Making sure your future purchases are matter certified should simplify and future proof your smart home going forward. Then just sit back and wait for the updates to come through for all of your current smart home devices.