The promise of a connected smart home is something that fans of sci-fi TV or movies have dreamed of for decades. But for the longest time, setting up a smart home was technical, expensive and not particularly intuitive. Much of this has changed as technology has improved both for hardware and internal software. These advancements and more competition in the category have also helped reduce the cost of smart home devices, opening up new possibilities.
With access to a wide range of smart home devices, the next part of the equation that needed improvements was connecting to hubs and then their management. For years, there was a lot of back and forth in the standards community about the best technology to connect each device to a central control point. Now, there is a singular standard that everyone is working towards -- Matter. But the universal connectivity standard could cause more harm than good to the smart home space -- at least in its current form.
Matter’s limitations to allow users to access all, or most, of a device’s features run the risk of turning users off of smart homes entirely due to the expectations set by the product and Matter’s inability to deliver on those features
How we got here
WiZ smart light bulbs offer an impressive range of tunable whites and a nifty trick of acting like motion sensors for automations.
Chris Wedel/CNETFor the most part, before Matter, Zigbee and Z-Wave were the two primary forms for connecting smart home devices and other IoT products to some kind of hub. The hub could be dedicated to a specific brand’s products, like Philips Hue. Then, there were more neutral options and could work with a range of brands, like Samsung SmartThings, Home Assistant, Homey, Hubitat and more.
Options like SmartThings allow device manufacturers to design their products to operate over Zigbee or Z-Wave and also ensure they are certified to work with the SmartThings hub. Now, the manufacturer can focus on its products and not worry about how a customer would control the device.
However, once Wi-Fi technology improved, IoT makers could create self-contained ecosystems of devices and software by utilizing a mobile app. Thankfully, most brands didn’t remove the other options of Zigbee and Z-Wave, so you could still connect it to third-party hubs like Home Assistant.
By utilizing Wi-Fi, manufacturers could begin offering product features that weren’t possible before, such as lights reacting to music, lighting scenes with moving lights, weather tracking and more. Owning all parts of the device and software allowed brands to begin distinguishing themselves from others, but this helped to create chaos for users.
While more smart home brands is a great for consumers, all the apps are not.
Chris Wedel/CNETThe chaos is caused by having a phone full of different smart device apps. Unless you only bought one brand of device, you’d need an app for each one. Well, that is if you want to take full advantage of what the device is capable of. Then, we started to see Google, Amazon and Apple start working on solving this problem.
While Apple was later to the smart home game than the other two, each brand has been attempting to create a relatively open platform to manage all of your smart devices in a single place, mostly regardless of brand. This is what Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple HomeKit are all about. Being a place where you can manage all of your smart devices in one place.
Of course, each 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 Apple or the other way around. The proposed solution is Matter.
Matter can connect everything, but that's it
The goal for Matter is to offer a singular smart device communication standard that greatly expands connectivity possibilities. In short, if something is Matter-certified then it can be connected and controlled by any Matter controller, be it an app like Google Home or Amazon Alexa, a smart speaker like the Apple HomePod Mini or the Nest Hub Max or another dedicated hublike Samsung SmartThings or Aqara.
Since its release on October 4, 2022, Matter 1.0 has grown to support hundreds of product types, including smart lights, smart plugs, fans, locks, refrigerators and washing machines. It’s no surprise that the platform has grown as quickly as it has since it has the backing of major brands such as Google, Apple, Amazon and Samsung.
Everything has sounded pretty good up to this point and in the grand scheme of things, it is. But the ease-of-use and effectiveness of Matter in it’s current state is also part of the problem.
Matter dumbs down most smart home devices
If you buy a device off the shelf at somewhere like Best Buy that has a Matter certification sticker on it, connecting it to a Matter controller is simple. For most products, the process is typically just powering on the device and then scanning the Matter QR code with your controller app of choice. Voila, you’re done!
Let’s say the device you connected was a smart light. Now, you can start controlling the device and setting up different automations, just as planned. But you notice that in the Matter controller app, like Google Home, you’re only seeing options to control power and brightness when the packaging advertises all kinds of fun effects, color-changing options and more. It's probably false advertising, right?
Govee's Floor Lamps offer a unique lighting option for your home that is outside of the traditional styles.
Chris Wedel/CNETUnfortunately, it’s not.
If you were to download the device's dedicated app, then you would see all of those advertised options. But if you have more than one brand of smart device -- let’s say a light bulb from Govee and a smart plug by TP-Link Kasa -- you will need two apps to access all of the features, instead of the one if you used Matter. Not only does this create clutter on user’s phones but also confusion since you’ll need to remember which device goes to which app.
But using Matter to control it all creates some disappointment. It’s disappointing because you got something you were excited about from the ads and seeing it at a friends or on TV, only to start using it and it’s far more limited than you thought.
Smart plugs are a quick and easy way to add not only remote control over appliances, but also automations.
Chris Wedel/CNETUnfortunately, this issue isn’t the device’s fault or the app you’re connecting it to. It’s a limitation of Matter. Matter is growing, but currently that growth is mostly focused on expanding basic device support. While adding more products to the standard is great, if the promise of a device and the reality are vastly different, there is a lot of potential to cause more harm than good for the smart home space.
For some devices, like a basic light bulb, controlling only power and brightness is fine. But for something like the Eve Weather that can track temperatures, humidity and barometric pressure to provide precise readings and even predictions, you want access to all of the features. But that isn’t what you get when viewing Eve through a Matter controller.
Below is the difference between the what you see from the Eve Weather device in the Google Home (left) connected via Matter and the Eve app.
Connecting a smart device via Matter not only restricts the available data and features but also restricts the ability to update settings.
Chris Wedel/CNETAside from the temperature being in Celsius, (I’m in the US so I’d prefer Fahrenheit), you can see the bare minimum amount of data that is accessible via Matter. It’s a similar experience when using door locks, humidifiers and other popular smart home devices
Matter may still be the smart home savior
The Apple HomePod Mini is a great gateway to starting a smart home for those in the Apple ecosystem as it gives access to Siri and is a Thread border router.
Chris Wedel/CNETCan you connect a Matter certified smart device to a Matter controller? Yes. Can you control that device? Also, yes. But that is pretty much where the experience ends. Is that enough to be considered a win for the standard? No, and I don’t think the Connectivity Standards Alliance believes it is either.
Personally, when looking at the landscape of smart home devices, Matter has little impact on whether I purchase a product -- as of today at least. For as much disdain as I have for the massive number of smart device apps on my phone, 38, I can’t bring myself to buy or recommend a product with Matter as the deciding factor.
As it stands today, I’m worried that smart home newbies could be turned off of smart devices by Matter’s limitations. Too often, the packaging and advertisements create great expectations for a product only to get home and have it operate at about 25% of what’s actually possible.
Proper expectations need to be set by both product manufacturers and those creating Matter controllers, Google, Amazon, Apple and others. By doing this, users can make better decisions in what to purchase and understand what they will or won’t get if they plan on using Matter to control the device. Matter can make smart devices more accessible, but it should be done responsibly.