What about Matter?

Though Home Assistant is brilliant if you’re a little bit techie and you’re willing to put the time into it, it clearly isn’t for everyone. The reality is that for most people, smart home tech is simply too complicated. With a myriad of technologies, standards and brands, it can be tricky to know if your Hue bulbs work with Alexa, for example,or if your LG ThinQ dishwasher can interface with Google.

That’s why in 2019, an enormous alliance of virtually every smart home company announced they had found a solution: yet another new standard.

Though this might sound like a recipe for more confusion, “Matter”, as it will be known, could finally be a mainstream breakthrough due to the sheer range of companies that have already signed up for it, from Philips Hue to Samsung SmartThings. And perhaps most importantly, the new standard has buy-in from the three biggest hub players: Apple, Google and Amazon.

What it will mean is that once Matter-compatible devices enter the market (which is expected to be later this year), consumers won’t need to worry about compatibility as long as there’s a Matter logo on the box.

And don’t worry if your house is already kitted out in smart home gear.

On a technical level, Matter isn’t massively changing anything: devices will still use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee or Thread, but there will be a common IP layer on top, to ensure devices can communicate. So once the standard launches, we can expect many existing smart home products to receive software updates to guarantee their support.