As I said in my previous articles, chaos reigned in the smart home market for a long time before the Matter standard was introduced, discouraging consumers who already do not have a good impression of smart home products.
Matter aims to unify the chaotic market and break down barriers. This not only gives consumers the freedom to choose IoT products but also offers manufacturers the opportunity to make up for their shortcomings.
Although today’s Matter standard is a “third-party standard,” the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), which currently leads the Matter standard, has a total of more than 500 members, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung SmartThings, and the Zigbee Alliance, meaning Matter is inherently authoritative.
Not surprisingly, even before the release of the Matter 1.0 specification, most IoT devices on the market announced they would soon join. According to Matter, the first devices supporting Matter 1.0 will hit the market as early as the fourth quarter and reach some level of competitiveness in 2023.
Even though brands are willing to open up to Matter for the development of the smart home industry, it does not mean they are willing to give up their own app and ecosystem: Philips Hue, a giant in the smart home lighting industry, for example, offers limited support for Hue lights with Matter but is still inextricably linked to its own controller and control software. For these brands, limited support for Matter is obviously the best choice to maintain their strength while not falling behind.
It is foreseeable that the development direction of the next generation of smart homes will also focus on Matter. Although Matter cannot fundamentally solve various problems in the current smart home market, and in some ways even exacerbates some problems, the emergence of Matter actually offers opportunities for platform integration: Matter’s universal standards can break through the boundaries of brands’ original smart home ecologies to take control of each other’s hardware.
