In recent years, the smart home market has grown exponentially. In a market once dominated by technology-savvy early adopters, the World Economic Forum estimates that over 130 million households will own a smart home device by 2022.
And while smart home devices continue to become more affordable, getting those devices to work well remains a challenge. In light of this, Matter is a new standard for smart homes that solves many of the pain points created by proprietary software and hardware, while bringing all of our IoT devices together.
Therefore, we will explain to you below, all the details of what it is, and how Matter, the new smart home protocol, works.
What is Matter, the new smart home protocol?
Matter is a smart home standard created by Project Connected Home Over IP (Project Chip) in 2019. It is now maintained by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), formerly known as the Zigbee Alliance.
The standard is royalty-free and encourages interoperability across devices and platforms. Officially, the Matter was released in November 2022.
The Matter smart home standard also addresses another common pain point with today’s IoT devices: devices require a constant internet connection. IoT devices previously relied solely on the cloud for everything, making them useless when you lose your internet connection.
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 – essential for sensitive hardware like smart locks and security cameras – and makes Matter even more beneficial.
Matter’s goal is to combine new features to deliver the best possible smart home experience.
Thread complements Matter
Thread is also a wireless protocol. It complements Matter-enabled devices efficiently. As a low-power, fabric-based wireless protocol, Thread creates a low-latency, offline environment that instantly sends and receives data between devices.
As such, your Matter-certified devices continue to work together even if you lose your internet connection. To better explain the Thread, the image above represents o Thread: it works as a low-latency wireless radio protocol. Through it, the devices “talk” to each other, and thus, they are connected.
This is a giant leap forward for offline IoT computing. The smart homes of yesteryear became useless when internet service was launched. However, Matter is about to make this better when combined with Thread.
What was there before Matter and the Thread?
IoT devices have been around for years but have been separated into their own unique categories. There was no universal standard to unite them, which was one of the biggest hurdles we had to overcome.
Additionally, most third-party smart home products use their own proprietary application during and after the initial setup process. And the more variety of device brands you had, the more apps you were forced to use.
And that brought a lot of stress to the user – thus configuring itself as the opposite of what a smart home should do. A smart home should work to help you in your day-to-day life, not against it.
Which devices are compatible with Matter?
THE Google added support for Matter, on many of its Nest and Android devices in December 2022. The Google Home app is compatible with Matter devices.
Google Home speaker, Google Home Mini, Nest Mini, Nest Audio, Nest Hub (1st and 2nd generation), Nest Hub Max and Nest Wi-Fi Pro support the standard and can be used. The Nest Thermostat will receive the Matter firmware update in 2023.
THE apple added Matter support to its iPhone and iPad lineup with the release of iOS/iPadOS 16.1 in late 2022. Apple users can also access Matter-enabled smart devices via Siri, the Apple Home app, and Command Center.
iOS apps that want to operate smart devices but haven’t implemented their own Matter ecosystem can do so in the Apple Home app, as long as they use the HomeKit API and have an Apple HomeKit entitlement.
THE amazon started updating its Eero routers and smart home hardware in 2022 and will finish in early 2023. The update will include most of the Amazon Echo lineup.
The company also announced a partnership with samsung in late 2022. Samsung Galaxy smartphone and tablet owners will be able to set up and control Matter devices with Amazon Alexa and Samsung SmartThings interchangeably.
Finally, it is worth noting that the trend is for more and more brands to develop and update their devices so that they are compatible with the Matter protocol.
Matter puts it all together perfectly
Matter is a new open source standard that uses wireless technology based on the Internet Protocol (IP), which Wi-Fi routers use to assign an IP address to each connected device.
Adding Thread wireless protocol can make complete offline communication on device network. This paves the way for a future where your Matter-certified products work together in synchronous harmony.
At the same time, various smart home wireless technologies have caused a fragmentation problem over the years. But by getting some of the biggest smart home device makers to work together, we’ll start to see Matter-certified devices to solve this problem.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that Matter is probably the answer we are looking for to fill the gap to improve future smart homes.
