WTH is "Matter"?

[westfw]

I keep getting vendor emails about "Matter", which appears to be some new home automation wireless standard.
Could they pick a less searchable name?
Anyway; who has opinions about it?  Worth looking into, or doomed to go the way of numerous other wireless networking "proposed standards"?

[pcprogrammer]

No idea, but here is a link to info about it.

[james_s]

"One protocol to connect compatible devices and systems with one another."

We already have had that for years, it's called MQTT.

[Marco]

It's Apple throwing the other home automation vendors a bone.

[ataradov]

This is continuation of 6LowPAN. You can ignore it, just like a million wireless protocols before it will die because companies will always want to lock you into their ecosystem. They are not going to leve the money on the table.

[Marco]

They are not going to leve the money on the table.

If they want to have low cost compatibility with Apple, they will. Matter is among other things a way for Apple to disguise its huge power in the consumer electronic market a bit, if everyone is forced into Homekit certification it's bad optics, attracts regulators. Regardless of optics though, they are king maker for anything but the extreme low end.

The markets Apple deign to leave to third parties have to tie in to their ecosystem or competitors are going to start replacing them. No one has the market power to resist this, not Hue, not anybody.

[ataradov]

I was thinking more about it being open and interoperable. It will be functional, but as you point out, the actual ecosystem will be mostly proprietary to Apple and a few other big companies. And at that point it does not really matter (lol) what it is called, it is just another random proprietary protocol.

Matter itself is too low level, they will just make higher levels proprietary and require certification to operate on their network, so true third-party devices would be locked out, rendering the whole thing useless, unless you are already sold on all Apple stuff. I personally would not build my home automation around this, it is jsust asking to be extorted in the future.

[SiliconWizard]

SiLabs has jumped on the bandwagon: https://www.silabs.com/wireless/matter

I have no particular interest in IoT stuff, but it doesn't look particularly bad as far as IoT goes.

[ataradov]

I expect that all companies with 802.15.4 and BLE radios will do it, it is just software, there is no need for new hardware, so there is not a lot of risk involved. Plus they all migrated from 6LowPAN to Thread anyway. Adding another layer on top is not a huge amount of work.

[Marco]

Thread and Zigbee seem to have screwed up by not getting SubGHz support going fast enough (no excuse really, it should have been a core part of the specs). I suspect WiFi HaLow is going to eat their lunch.

[james_s]

I've been using Home Assistant now for a few years, after some initial teething pains (the documentation sucks and the support community is useless) I've been really happy with it. I have a bunch of different brands of zigbee and wifi stuff and it all works together seamlessly. If it had better documentation, a better out of box experience, and if they'd quit tinkering with it and just focus on stability it would be what IoT and home automation ought to be.

[SiliconWizard]

Thread and Zigbee seem to have screwed up by not getting SubGHz support going fast enough (no excuse really, it should have been a core part of the specs). I suspect WiFi HaLow is going to eat their lunch.

I suspect that as well, although HaLow seems to be lagging a bit in terms of deployment, but even so. Even if Matter gets significant "market share", HaLow is still likely to overthrow it eventually.

[ataradov]

For ZigBee the issue with sub-GHz range was channel allocation. 2.4 GHz is universal, but for sub-GHz there were very narrow channels allocated for IEEE802.15.4 and they varied across regions. And in Europe there was only one channel. It made no sense for ZigBee to push sub-Ghz, since underlying physical layer is so limited.

Wi-Fi alliance has more wight, so they can probably solve that issue much better than ZB Alliance ever could.

[Marco]

I suspect that as well, although HaLow seems to be lagging a bit in terms of deployment, but even so. Even if Matter gets significant "market share", HaLow is still likely to overthrow it eventually.

Matter is a generic IP protocol. Thread, Wifi and Zigbee+bridge compete, but what wins isn't really relevant to Matter.

[ataradov]

Well, first big player (Belkin) is bailing on Matter - https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/15/23641930/belkin-matter-wemo-smart-home

Their apparent concern is exactly what I described - too much interop is not good for business.

[Marco]

They already have homekit though, so it's not for pushing their own cloud services. They probably assume having homekit only has more high end appeal, they are probably right.

Non Apple home automation is just a tiny niche at this point. Some hobbyists, dying competitors and extreme low end ... it's an Apple world.