Matter promises to unify a long-segregated market, standardising smart home devices and benefitting integrators. San Williams finds out what Matter is and how it’s set to revolutionise the industry.

The gateway to the custom installation market can be as simple as a light bulb. Users can learn how to connect it, turn it on and off and then adjust the brightness all from a smartphone. Then before long, the thought enters: “What if I can do this, but to everything in the home?”

This, combined with today’s countless range of smart home devices, is the reason why more are moving toward home automation. By the end of the year, it’s forecasted the smart home market will hit $5.5 billion (with an annual compound growth rate of 8.7% over the next four years) according to Statista’s Smart Home – Australia market forecast. By 2028, the penetration for smart home technology is slated at 93.7% of all households.

While the smart home market has never performed better, it has also been plagued by an industry disconnect.

An end user installing a smart home hub or assistant would expect it to work with all their other devices like motorised blinds, security cameras and HVAC systems but this isn’t always the case. Smart home products started flooding the shelves without a unifying standard and multiple big-name brands started releasing products that only work with the solutions they want it to.

That’s where Matter comes in.

“Everybody was sick and tired of brands developing their own platforms and they really wanted a universal language that they could all write software and make hardware for. It may not necessarily replace what integrators do, but it’s an add-on and it gives more benefit to consumers,” eXperience ONE managing director Matt Manalis says.

Serving as an open-source, industry-standard, Matter is designed to simplify the smart home experience by creating a common language for smart home devices. From purchasing, setting up and daily use, Matter aims to make smart devices work together across platforms and ecosystems, no matter the brand of the product (meaning no more checking the ‘Works With’ on the box).

Whether it’s HomeKit, Google Home or Alexa, a user will be able to control Matter smart lighting, smart locks and the rest via big-brand solutions including Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and Bixby.

Removing compatibility barriers allows for more options for devices to integrate. Before, there were limited devices in a single ecosystem. In the future, if every major ecosystem supports Matter, almost all devices can be integrated.

Another benefit of Matter’s standardised control and communication is the simplicity of how people create smart homes. It was this feature that brought onboard Onvis, a smart home manufacturer.

“Before Matter, the setup process was messy, especially when inputting WiFi credentials. The new setup is much easier than most of the previous single ecosystem products,” an Onvis spokesperson says.

Designed for speed and scalability, Matter will provide more reliability in a consistent, fast and responsive local connection. It also boasts tight security, making the most of blockchain technology, a secure, transparent and immutable distributed ledger, among other inherent measures.

Before Matter, Eve Home products were only compatible with Apple Home with devices talking directly and locally to an Apple Home Hub, rather than relying on a proprietary bridge or cloud. After recognising the potential of Matter, Eve Home took the plunge early, releasing the Matter-upgraded Eve Energy smart plug, Eve Motion sensor and Eve Door and Window contact sensors.

“Matter takes most of the guesswork out of the purchasing or sourcing process. Products on a retail shelf carrying the badge will almost certainly work out of the box with the infrastructure in a customer’s home,” Eve Home public relations director Lars Felber says.

“Matter has that same principle at its core, enabling us to support additional platforms without having to build and support the infrastructure required for conventional cloud-to-cloud connections.”

Lars says it was the Matter controller and Thread Border Router (TBR) features that made their way into both digital assistants and TVs and fridges that captivated the company.

As the name implies, a Matter controller controls Matter devices without a task being limited to a device category. Therefore, the control function can be integrated into diverse products such as TVs and apps, not to forget existing smart home hubs. A TBR simply connects to a network via WiFi or Ethernet and uses its RF radio to communicate with the Thread mesh network.

“Matter will be the key to interoperability between infrastructure and interfaces. Only Matter-based installations will be truly open and future-proof. We strongly believe that Matter components like ours, namely our upcoming Eve Blinds Collection, can complement hard-wired systems once both worlds are on Matter,” Lars says.

What does it mean for integrators?

At the 2023 CEDIA Tech Summit on the Gold Coast, Matt Manalis hosted a session called ‘IoT: The Gateway Drug’, touting the immense benefits of IoT solutions to introduce new customers to the power of smart home solutions. Matter should only ease this experience for the end user, creating more business for integrators.

Matt says that outside of the end user benefits, it will be the universal language for smart home technology will bring major benefits to the integration market: “Crestron and Control4 have both signed on to that alliance, which is good because then they’ll be sharing the same information as other platforms, and all the big names are realising where the industry is moving with Matter and what they need to do to make their hardware and software compatible with it.

“It will be great for integrators, as customers will be able to go and buy Matter-compatible robot vacuum cleaners, bring them home, connect to the system and have the integration readily available. It’s those sorts of things in the coming years that we’ll see as the great benefit of Matter.”

He adds that there are going to be a whole lot of new technologies released in this space.

In the past, many cheaper smart home products were a hit-and-miss for integrators and enthusiasts. Matter brings a common language for devices but the high-end benefits, coinciding with the expected market boom, is a huge step in the right direction for both integrators and end users.