Matter may harm the smart home more than it helps

The promise of a connected smart home is something that fans of sci-fi TV and movies have dreamed of for decades. But for a long time, setting up a smart home was technical, expensive, and not exactly intuitive. Much of that has changed as technology has improved, both in terms of hardware and internal software. These developments and increased competition in the category have also helped drive down 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 improvement was connecting them to hubs and then managing them. For years, there’s been a lot of back-and-forth in the standards community about the best technology to connect every device to a central point of control. Now, there’s a single standard that everyone is working toward: Matter. But the universal connectivity standard could do more harm than good for the smart home space, at least in its current form.

Matter’s limitations in giving users access to all or most of a device’s features could lead to users being turned off of smart homes altogether due to the expectations the product creates and Matter’s inability to deliver on 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 could be assigned to products from a specific brand, such as Philips Hue. After that, there were more neutral options and they could work with a range of brands, such as Samsung SmartThings, Home Assistant, Homey, Hubitat, and more.

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

However, as Wi-Fi technology improved, IoT makers were able to create self-contained ecosystems of devices and software using a mobile app. Fortunately, most brands haven’t removed the other options of Zigbee and Z-Wave, so you can still connect it to third-party hubs like Home Assistant.

By leveraging Wi-Fi, manufacturers were able to offer product features that were previously impossible, such as lights that respond to music, light scenes with moving lights, weather tracking, and more. Owning all the components of the device and the software allowed brands to differentiate themselves from others, but it also created chaos for users.

The chaos comes from a phone full of different smart device apps. Unless you only bought one brand of device, you need an app for each one. Well, that is if you want to take full advantage of what the device can do. Then we saw Google, Amazon and Apple get to work to solve this problem.

While Apple entered the smart home world later than the other two, each brand has tried to create a relatively open platform to manage all of your smart devices in one place, usually 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, every brand wanted to be unique in some way. This leads to more chaos, because sometimes a device works with Google and Amazon, but not with Apple, or vice versa. The proposed solution is Matter.

Matter can connect everything, but that’s all

The goal of Matter is to provide a unique smart device communications standard that vastly expands the possibilities of connectivity. In short, if something is Matter certified, it can be connected to and controlled by any Matter controller, whether it’s 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 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 so quickly, given that it has the backing of major brands like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Samsung.

Everything has sounded pretty good so far, and in the grand scheme of things it is. But the usability and effectiveness of Matter in its current state is also part of the problem.

Matter makes most smart home devices dumber

If you buy a pre-built device from a place like Best Buy that has a Matter certification sticker on it, connecting it to a Matter controller is easy. For most products, the process is usually as simple as turning on the device and then scanning the Matter QR code with the controller app of your choice. Voilà, you’re good to go!

Let’s say the device you connected was a smart light bulb. Now you can start controlling it and setting up various automations, just like you planned. But you notice that in the Matter controller app, just like Google Home, all you see are options to control power and brightness, while the packaging advertises all sorts of fun effects, color-changing options, and more. It’s probably false advertising, right?

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

If you were to download the device’s dedicated app, you’d see all of those advertised options. But if you have more than one brand of smart device — say, a Govee lightbulb and a TP-Link Kasa smart plug — you’ll need two apps to access all of their features, rather than the single one you had if you were using Matter. This not only adds clutter to users’ phones, but also creates confusion, since you’ll need to remember which device goes to which app.

But using Matter to control it all does leave you a bit disappointed. It’s disappointing because you’ve gotten something you’ve been excited about from the ads and seen it with friends or on TV, only to go and use it and it’s a lot more limited than you thought.

Unfortunately, this problem isn’t with the device or the app you’re connecting it to. It’s a limitation of Matter. Matter is growing, but right now that growth is mostly focused on expanding the base support for devices. While adding more products to the standard is great, there’s a lot of potential to do more harm than good to the smart home space when the promise of a device and the reality are vastly different.

For some devices, like a simple light bulb, it’s fine to just control the power and brightness. But for something like the Eve Weather that can track temperature, humidity, and air pressure to provide accurate readings and even forecasts, you want access to all the features. But that’s not what you get when you view Eve through a Matter controller.

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

Aside from the temperature in Celsius (I live in the US, so I’d prefer Fahrenheit), you can see the minimum amount of data accessible through Matter. It’s a similar experience when using door locks , humidifiers , and other popular smart home devices

Matter could still be the savior of the smart home

Can you connect a Matter-certified smart device to a Matter controller? Yes. Can you control that device? Also yes. But that’s 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 one or the other.

Personally, when I look at the smart home device landscape, Matter has little impact on whether I buy a product — at least for now. Despite all the disdain I have for the sheer number of smart device apps on my phone, 38 of them, I can’t bring myself to buy or recommend a product with Matter as a deciding factor.

As it stands, I fear that smart home newbies will be turned off by Matter’s limitations. Too often, the packaging and advertising create high expectations for a product, but in the home, it works at about 25% of what’s actually possible.

Both product manufacturers and those who make Matter controllers—Google, Amazon, Apple, and others—need to set the right expectations. By doing so, users can make better decisions about what they’re buying, and understand what they’re getting and what they’re not getting if they plan to use Matter to control their device. Matter can make smart devices more accessible, but it needs to be done responsibly.