Matter? Wait or Nah?

I don’t exactly have anything that I need to automate at the moment, but I see all the toys and want to play with them. The question is whether or not to purchase and play or wait. I know the protocol is supposedly supposed to be live on the market starting next month, but I can’t quite figure out what that means exactly is coming. It’s like either a bunch of top secret stuff is coming and the manufacturers don’t want you to not buy their existing stock, or nothing new is really coming with the protocol and it’s just going to slowly trickle in. Anyone know anything? I feel like I’m supposed to be excited for Matter, but don’t quite have anything specific to be excited about.

Matter will come out slowly and won’t have a huge device variety right out of the gate.

I wouldn’t recommend you to buy into an entire new protocol unless you want it now, but to keep buying devices paired with good protocols that work locally and you already have the hardware for.

For me, I’m still buying Zigbee devices as needed because I already have devices working greatly in this protocol but I won’t invest in ZWave(no gateway) until I can see how Matter goes.

In short, wait and see (if you can).

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Is ZWave dead/impossible to get a gateway for now? I have a legit Smartthings Hub I used to use, but never used the ZWave devices so I switched over to Conbee so I wouldn’t have to use their cloud. Most of my setup is Zigbee as well. Maybe I’m just bored and need a new HA project.

Maybe it doesn’t matter

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There’s nothing wrong with ZWave at all. You can pickup a good 500 or 700 series coordinator for a reasonable cost.

I have a rather robust ZWave infrastructure in my installation so I’ll continue to invest in specific devices for instance - I have a bunch of custom ZWave shades and I will probably finish the home before I stop buying those…

I built out a Zigbee mesh and im putting new stuff there… That part of my installation is small and cheap enough for me so far that I would be ok trashing the whole Zigbee infrastructure in favor of Thread / Matter. Theoretically the devices im picking right now have the right radios to technically be software upgradable, but we’ll see.

Im in a spot right now where I’ve got most of the house ‘stable’ so I can wait on new devices. I’ll buy the odd smart bulb or replace something if it goes bad, but I am waiting to see if matter actually lives up to its promises before I go all in on that protocol.

To feed the itch… Dashboards, revisions to underlying automation, complete rip and replace of the network… There’s plenty of things to be done while waiting to see what happens.

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