Amazon has turned on the Thread-capabilities inside its Echo devices so they can support the Matter smart home interoperability standard in its totality, so Kevin and I talk about what that will and won’t do for smart home users. It’s also the moment I give up on my dreams for the Matter specification. We also discuss the end of the Amazon Halo products, and plans to make Alexa savvier by updating the large language model behind the digital assistant. Then we talk about Arm’s plans for an initial public offering and a new report from Forrester on the state of the IoT. After that, we talk about Google and Apple teaming up to help prevent stalkers from using AirTags and other tracking devices, and the return of a rumored Nest tracking device. Then we mention Abode’s integration with Google’s Nest devices, and Kevin reviews the SwitchBot Hub 2 (with Matter) and BlindTilt. We end by answering a listener question about Level locks and its plans to support Matter.
Our guest this show is Jonathan Beri, who is the founder and CEO of Golioth, a platform to link hardware to the cloud. Golioth recently raised $4.6 million in a tough funding environment, so we talk a bit about what Beri plans to do with the money. But the bulk of our conversation touches on the changes happening in the embedded world as connectivity gets added to more devices. Beri provides historical context to help explain why the embedded world and OT staff have been so slow to adopt the Internet of things, and then expresses his hopes that the phrase IoT will simply fade into the background as connectivity becomes assumed. Before we can get to that place, he explains what vendors, developers and buyers need to think about from security to business processes. It’s a good show.
Amazon needs to now add support for Matter Bridges like Hue, Aqara and the upcoming Ikea Dirigibillyboo.
SmartThings also. Still no Matter bridge support, even though ST has had iOS and Thread support for a couple of months.
Is there any Matter controller other than Apple that can add a third party Matter bridge? I haven’t kept up, but reportedly that was why Phillips hue delayed its own matter launch. Not enough partners were ready.
Home Assistant, if you can keep their Matter integration working.
I think Matter works great, since the early IOS 16 beta, every matter enabled device worked flawlessly with it. I’m trading in all my older echo devices to get a homepod or two to go with my AppleTV.
I expected Apple to be the first to break Matter, but it seems Amazon and Google decided to step up and take care of it.
I can’t say for Google. They won’t support matter on IOS yet, and my Amazon Fire Tablet can’t access matter through the google home app on it yet either.
I agree with Stacey that so far matter is really disappointing. And I think Kevin‘s analysis explains why: it’s the dribs and drabs bit where each company has implemented a different part of matter and they don’t all work together yet. I personally wish they had all just held off releasing any “phased rollouts” and waited until all the big companies had all the promised features working.
I had two personal hopes for Matter:
One) lots more interesting and inexpensive devices to add apple home. So far there aren’t a lot, but what there are have been really good, including being able to add my SwitchBot curtainbots via the SwitchBot hub 2.
Two) being able to help my friends who ask questions about what will work with what they already have by saying “just get something with the Matter logo.” Not only has this not happened yet, things have gotten more confusing! Just today one community member over at the smartthings forum was trying to figure out why he couldn’t add a brand new Nanoleaf essentials lightbulb to his SmartThings account. the answer was that the one he had was the previous HomeKit-only version, because the Matter version is not yet being sold on Amazon in the UK. You have to get it from the nanoleaf website there. So he didn’t even know there were two nearly identical models. Understandably.
So, yeah, not happy with Matter right now.