Last month's Ikea's announcement of more than 20 new Matter-over-Thread devices felt like a much-needed breakthrough moment for the high-profile smart home standard. If Ikea—a brand with a broad, not necessarily tech-savvy customer base—is all-in on Matter, have we finally arrived at the smart home utopia that was first promised back in late 2019?
It was then, amid growing frustrations from users around smart home compatibility, that tech giants including Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung formed the Project Connected Home over IP (Project CHIP) working group, and laid out their plans to fix the chaos.
By mid-2021, Project CHIP had blossomed into Matter. The big idea was that Matter would work as your smart home’s universal translator; a common language designed to get all your connected devices talking locally and securely. If it was a Matter-certified device, it should work with any Matter-compatible platform or app, whatever the brand.
Devices with that Matter mark started arriving in late 2022, in the weeks after the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) officially released Matter 1.0 specification and opened the certification program for brands to get on board.
The trouble in those early days was that the Matter mark didn’t take the guesswork out of the equation for consumers. In fact, it added an extra layer of confusion. Amazon actually muddied the waters during its keynote presentation at the Matter 1.0 launch event when it was revealed that neither iOS nor wireless mesh network Thread would be part of its initial Alexa and Matter integration.
That was a major setback, as Thread, alongside Wi-Fi and Ethernet, was touted as a major part of Matter, offering a fast, reliable, secure, and energy-saving network protocol.
“We felt confident in Matter when it launched with version 1.0,” Tobin Richardson, president and CEO of the CSA, explained to me. “But nothing provides the real-life feedback that we needed until devices and ecosystems were in the market and being used by consumers. That first year was critical, and we began to see some immediate areas where improvement was needed.”
In that first year, if you bought a Nanoleaf Essential lightbulb, with that Matter mark on the box, and you lived in an Alexa household, you couldn’t actually add it to your Matter system.
“When the different ecosystems were deploying their Thread border routers”—the gateway that links the devices in your Thread mesh to your home’s IP network and the internet—“everyone was on a different commit, so you have all these different code bases all in production, all trying to work together,” Nanoleaf’s CEO Gimmy Chu explained to me. “And different ecosystems had a bunch of different bugs.”
Chu told me that Nanoleaf paid the price for being an early champion of Matter-over-Thread, and the smart lighting specialist ultimately ditched Thread in favor of Matter-over-Wi-Fi after that first wave of products.
“We're doing some outdoor products, and now we use Wi-Fi,” he explained. “But in an ideal world, these should be Thread products, because it has much better range, and also it's low power.”
Chu hasn’t given up on Thread, though, and said testing version 1.4 is going well. The latest version has made it simpler for devices to work in a unified, brand-agnostic, mesh network, regardless of the software or hardware ecosystem being used. It has also streamlined cloud access and simplified device setup, ultimately helping to make Matter more robust, scalable, and user-friendly.
“I think that Matter and Thread has had a lot of negativity in the past few years, but it's time for the consumers to give it another try,” says Chu. “It's gotten much better. A lot of people in the industry have been working very, very hard to get it to the point that it's at today.”
It’s an area of improvement that Richardson is also keen to highlight. “Thread is an important, foundational technology of Matter,” he said. “We are closely aligned with the Thread Group and continue to look for ways to improve the Thread experience within Matter and the use cases that it enables.”
Growing Pains
Thread took most of the early heat when Matter started stumbling, but it wasn’t the only problem. Dev headaches, slow rollout, and a lack of compatible devices have all played a part.
For an emerging standard, this is not unusual. But when the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon, and Samsung team up, it becomes a much bigger story.
“We started this with a lot of fanfare, and usually standards don’t. They sort of start off in a corner, with maybe a couple of super nerdy articles about it, and then, two years later, something shows up when companies start rolling it out.”
That’s the take of Daniel Moneta, chair of the Matter Marketing and Product Subgroup at the CSA. Moneta has also spent the past few years working with Samsung SmartThings in a product and marketing role, giving him plenty of irons in the Matter fire.
“I do think there were a lot of expectations, that maybe we set, but maybe people just had, in terms of things like how quickly it was going to be done, how fast products were going to come out, which problems Matter was going to solve and which ones it wasn’t,” he said.
Moneta believes many criticisms of Matter stem from its tech-fluent early adopters already being obsessive about the details. Speaking as a self-titled “nerdy enthusiast,” he understands.
“We're very interested in the technical nuance … in looking at things like compatibility matrices. The smart home has historically been for that enthusiast in the home and, almost by definition, a group of people who have greater expectations, want more flexibility, and also maybe want it to do things beyond necessarily what it was built for.
“I’m not saying Matter wasn't made for that audience, because I think it's fantastic for that audience,” he continues. “But Matter was also designed for the Ikea buyer or the Samsung TV buyer. The one that goes, ‘I have a Matter hub in this TV I just bought. Maybe I should buy some light bulbs.’”
A lot of Matter criticism stems from the fact that, when the CSA announces a new Matter specification, which happens twice a year (it just recently announced version 1.4.2), and more device support, it takes time for each ecosystem to become compatible.
It took almost a year for the major platforms to support the new device types included in the 2023 Matter 1.2 spec, like air purifiers and robot vacuum cleaners, and even then support rolled out gradually. This meant that supposedly Matter-compatible devices were being sold, but users couldn't actually add them to their Matter controller.
It's not a situation that's going away, either. Take that exciting Ikea news—the brand's Dirigera hub will now support Matter 1.4 but only for device types that Ikea sells; think sensors, lights, plugs, and remotes. More devices will be added as Ikea launches products in those categories, but we’re unlikely to see Ikea bankrolling dev work to be compatible with device types it doesn’t sell.
“I don't see them supporting every device under the sun,” Daniel Moneta explained. “And then there's Home Assistant, where their goal is to support everything. But you also might have a Matter controller or ecosystem that's 100 percent lawn care, and all it supports are sprinklers and soil sensors. Maybe it doesn't need to support ovens. That's fine, it's why we don't mandate what controllers support, because we want there to be flexibility.”
Moving Forward
The good news is that Matter is now in a much better place both for the consumer and for the companies building products. As those companies push forward with their idea of what the smart home should be with the help of AI—as Google puts Gemini in all the places Assistant used to live, as Amazon ramps up Echo's capabilities with Alexa+ and Apple works out what exactly next-gen Siri looks like ahead of expected new smart home hardware releases—Matter is working to ensure it can finally make the experience of linking that all together much smoother.
Take the recently launched 1.4.2 release; it’s light on new categories but heavy on things that could quietly improve everyday reliability for the average user.
“We began to see some immediate areas where improvement was needed in areas like setup, multi-admin, border router capabilities, and overall reliability,” Tobin Richardson of the CSA explained. “We’ve been able to make improvements to all of these subsequent Matter software updates and continue to make enhancements ongoing to make the experience ever better.”
The CSA is also doing a lot of work on the admin side to make Matter certification more streamlined, while also getting ecosystem compatibility from the major platforms at the same time. Earlier this year, it announced that Apple, Google, and Samsung would begin accepting test results from its Interop Lab in Oregon as sufficient for their respective Works With programs and badges. Amazon joined the party a bit late but has since stated it will be getting involved too.
“I think that came heavily from some of the feedback that companies like us gave,” explained the Nanoleaf boss Gimmy Chu. “We, as the small product companies, were having to do a lot of product certifications because the standard kept evolving and changing, and it was getting really costly to roll out products.”
So while that Matter mark on the box still can’t tell you for sure that it will definitely work on your chosen ecosystem, a combination of that plus a “Works With” badge can. It's questionable as to whether it's the ultimate simplicity the CSA is striving for, but Richardson feels it's well on its way.
“We’ve made tremendous progress in a short period of time, compared to other high-profile standards like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth,” Richardson says. “What our members, collectively, have built is more than just a paper standard.”
He adds that the proof of Matter’s progress is in the standard's adoption by brands like Ikea. “It’s tremendously important when big, well-known global brands commit to the standard,” he says. “It shows it works, brings momentum, and reassures—and it motivates others to jump on board. The list of companies supporting this is growing, not holding steady, not retreating. That's an important data point.”
It’s a sentiment that Daniel Moneta shares: “To go from launching [in 2022] to a company like Ikea to be using it—one that moves very cautiously and slowly and is dedicated to a good, problem-free experience, usually for absolute beginner smart home user— it’s a stunning milestone.”
Chu, who admits to still being cautious after Nanoleaf was burned by being a Matter front-runner, agrees the standard has come a long way and says that brands dragging their heels should consider jumping on board.
“I think the CSA have a different challenge on their hands, which is, their reputation was kind of damaged from the very beginning. But I have confidence that more and more companies will continue to build Matter products,” he tells WIRED. “I think any product company thinking about making a non-Matter smart home product now, they’re kind of silly.
“Was Matter designed in the optimal way? Absolutely not. Are there things that it could have done better? Yes. But it is still a much better solution than every product speaking a different proprietary language. The vision for all the ecosystems to speak the same language is still a great vision, and everyone's working toward it.”
