Fact: Why the new standard could derail the future of smart homes

The promise of a connected smart home is something that TV and sci-fi movie fans have been dreaming about for decades. However, for a long time, setting up a smart home was a technical, expensive and not very intuitive task. Much of this has changed as technology in both hardware and firmware has improved. These advances and greater competition in the category have also helped lower the cost of smart home devices, opening up new opportunities.

With a wide range of smart home devices available, the next part of the equation requiring improvement was connecting to and then managing hubs. Over the years, there have been debates in the standards community about the best technology to connect each device to a central control point. There is a single standard that everyone works towards – matter. However, a universal connectivity standard may be doing more harm than good in the smart home space – at least in its current form.

Matter’s restrictions on allowing users to access all or most of the device’s features may result in users being completely rejected by Smart Homes due to the expectations set by the product and Matter’s inability to deliver those features

How we got here

For the most part, before Matter, Zigbee and Z-Wave were the two primary forms of connecting smart home devices and other IoT products to some sort of hub. The hub can be dedicated to products of a specific brand, e.g. Philips Hue. Then more neutral options became available and you could work with multiple brands like Samsung SmartThings, Home Assistant, Homey, Hubitat and more.

Options like SmartThings allow device manufacturers to design their products to run on Zigbee or Z-Wave and also ensure they are certified to work with a SmartThings hub. Now the manufacturer can focus on their products and not worry about how the customer will control the device.

However, as Wi-Fi technology improves, IoT developers will be able to create independent ecosystems of devices and software using a mobile app. Fortunately, most brands didn’t remove other Zigbee and Z-Wave options, so you could still connect them to third-party hubs like Home Assistant.

By leveraging Wi-Fi, manufacturers could begin to offer product features that were not previously possible, such as music-responsive lights, lighting scenes with moving lights, weather tracking, and more. Owning all parts of the device and software allowed brands to start to differentiate themselves from others, but it helped create chaos for users.

Chaos comes from having a phone full of different smart device apps. Unless you only purchased one brand of device, you’ll need an app for each of them. Well, if you want to get the most out of your device. Then we started to see Google, Amazon and Apple start working on solving this problem.

Although Apple came to the smart home later than the other two brands, each brand has tried to create a relatively open platform for managing all its smart devices in one place, largely regardless of brand. This is what Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple HomeKit are all about. Being a place where you can manage all your smart devices in one place.

Of course, every brand wanted to be unique in some way. This leads to more chaos because sometimes a device will work with Google and Amazon but not with Apple and vice versa. The proposed solution is Materia.

Matter can connect anything, but that’s all

Matter’s goal is to offer a single standard for smart device communications that greatly expands connectivity options. In short, if something is Matter-certified, it can be connected and controlled using any Matter controller, whether an app like Google Home or Amazon Alexa, a smart speaker like the Apple HomePod Mini or Nest Hub Max, or another dedicated hub like like Samsung SmartThings or Aqara.

Since its launch on October 4, 2022, Matter 1.0 has grown to support hundreds of product types, including smart lighting, smart plugs, fans, locks, refrigerators, and washing machines. It’s no wonder that the platform has grown as fast as possible since it has the support of major brands such as Google, Apple, Amazon, and Samsung.

Everything up to this point has sounded pretty good, and overall it has. But the ease of use and effectiveness of Materia in its current state is also part of the problem.

Matter makes most smart home devices stupid

If you buy a device off the shelf at a store like Best Buy that has a Matter-certified sticker, connecting it to a Matter controller is simple. For most products, the process usually involves simply turning on the device and then scanning the Matter QR code using your chosen control app. Voila, done!

Let’s assume the connected device was a smart light. Now you can start controlling the device and configuring various automations as planned. However, you’ll notice that in a Matter controller app like Google Home, you only see options to control power and brightness when the packaging advertises all kinds of fun effects, color-changing options, and more. This is probably false advertising, right?

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

If you download the dedicated app to your device, you will see all the advertised options. However, if you have more than one brand of smart device – say a light bulb from Govee and a smart plug from TP-Link Kasa – you’ll need two apps to access all the features, instead of the one you used Material. This not only creates clutter on users’ phones, but also confusion as you have to remember which device runs which app.

But using Materia to control it all creates a bit of a letdown. It’s disappointing because you found something in advertising that excited you and you saw it with your friends or on TV and then you started using it and it’s much more limited than you thought.

Unfortunately, this issue is not the fault of your device or the app you connect it to. This is the limitation of Matter. The field is growing, but currently this growth is mainly focused on expanding basic device support. While adding more products to the standard is great, if a device’s promises and reality differ significantly, there is great potential to do more harm than good to the smart home space.

For some devices, such as a regular light bulb, it’s okay to only control the power and brightness. But for something like Ewa Weather that can track temperature, humidity and barometric pressure to provide accurate readings and even predictions, you want to have access to all the features. But that’s not what you get by viewing Eve through the Matter Controller.

Below is the difference between what you see on the Eve Weather device on Google Home (left) connected via Matter and the Eve app.

Apart from the temperature being given in degrees Celsius (I’m in the US, so I prefer Fahrenheit), you can only see a minimal amount of data available through Matter. The same applies to the use of door locks, humidifiers and other popular smart home devices

Matter can still be the savior of the smart home

Can you connect a Matter-certified smart device to a Matter controller? Yes. Can you control this device? Also yes. But that’s really where the experience ends. Is this enough to acknowledge the victory of the standard? No, and I don’t think the Communications Standards Association believes it either.

Personally, looking at the smart home device landscape, Matter has little impact on whether I buy the product – at least as of today. For all my contempt for the vast number of smartphone apps on my 38-year-old phone, I can’t bring myself to buy or recommend a product where Matter is the deciding factor.

As of today, I’m concerned that smart home novices may be turned off from smart devices due to Matter’s limitations. Too often, packaging and advertising create great expectations for a product that, once it arrives at home, will perform at around 25% of its actual capabilities.

Appropriate expectations must be set by both product manufacturers and those who create Matter, Google, Amazon, Apple and others controllers. This way, users can make better purchasing decisions and know what they will and won’t get if they plan to use Matter to control their device. Matter can make smart devices more accessible, but it must be done responsibly.