TL;DR: We’ll have a Matter livestream on Wednesday, January 10. Post all your questions about Matter and Home Assistant in the comment section, and we’ll try to answer them during the stream!
In late 2022, Matter was first released to the public. It promised to be the new local home automation standard that would unify various manufacturers’ ecosystems and smart devices. We joined the CSA, the alliance developing Matter, to have a front-row seat and make our implementation of Matter the best we can. Now, one year later, did Matter live up to its promise, and what’s the state of Matter within Home Assistant?
We ask this question because lately, articles about Matter in the media have turned a bit sour. Compared to older standards like Zigbee and Z-Wave, they say, Matter is not yet in good shape. But this is not an entirely fair comparison: Zigbee and Z-Wave have had many years to develop into what they are now, while Matter was released just over a year ago. A new standard will always need some time to settle in and mature.
Our view on Matter is both more optimistic and still realistic. We think Matter completely fits our Open Home vision. In the future, Matter will give us all fast, reliable, and local control of our smart home devices. At the same time, we’re realistic; this perfect vision of Matter has yet to arrive, and not everything we hoped for is possible today. Still, significant companies and organizations around the globe have committed to Matter, and they are improving it every month. We believe Matter is here to stay.
So, instead of discussing what isn’t currently working in Matter, we want to explain what Matter can offer you today. We want to show you the potential Matter has for the future and how your first steps with Matter today prepare you for that. Talk about what Thread is, how it relates to Matter - it is not the same! - and how to build your Thread network. And much more.
On Wednesday, January 10, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET, we’ll be hosting a State of Matter livestream to discuss this and address your questions and concerns about Matter and Home Assistant. We’ll make sure it’s an excellent watch for both beginners and more technically-oriented viewers - our Matter developers will be there to give you a technical deep-dive into Matter, too. Please save the date in your calendar and post all your questions and concerns in our comments section!
The article addresses the point of standards needing time to mature. Could you elaborate on this further and compare the challenges and progress of Matter with ZigBee, Z-Wave, Thread and/or HomeKit?
What can we learn from the history of these other standards and which challenges have these standards overcome which Matter is still facing?
Home Assistant has seen advances in supporting the integration of Matter devices into our self-hosted smart home, but that is only half of the story of Matter. Matter should also eliminate the need for multiple bridges and enable older devices using Zigbee or Z-wave to be integrated through a matter bridge.
Now my question: is there a plan for Nabu Casa to enable a “bridge mode” for Home Assistant? It is in direct conflict with the monetization of the project since it would be much easier to integrate all of our Home Assistant devices into Google, Alexa, etc. In this post, one of the comments explains that a node-red implementation already exists and that a similar project like Homee already implements a Matter bridge.
I appreciate that you’re doing this livestream, I will be watching!
I build my home network mostly on Z-wave, and am wondering in what direction I should expand further. I feel like Z-wave is the better technology (no interference with wifi & bluetooth frequencies, better penetration trough all the concrete & rebar in my house, the new Z-wave LR range looks amazing), however it looks like in practice it’s losing some steam with not many new z-wave products being released.
So I would like it if you could cover possible transition scenario’s for us z-wave adepts who are considering to venture into Matter in future.
Also what does the future look like: direct matter support on devices, or will many of them need proprietary hubs that ensure the Matter integration? Just today I looked at the Aqara Curtain Driver E1 for example, which supports Matter but only if you buy the Aqara HUB…
I was also looking at a review of the Nuki 4 Pro door lock, which supports Matter, but for most of the configurations you need to use the Nuki app. In practice this means that if Nuki goes bankrupt the lock becomes mostly useless as well. With Z-wave this problem does not exist, as all configuration settings are done trough Z-wave. The only problem you could face if the manufacturer of a z-wave goes bankrupt is that there will not be any firmware updates anymore to fix possible bugs. Will Matter be able to catch up with Z-wave on being bankruptcy proof? In the Nuki review they mention connection problems when using Matter over Thread, any insights on reliability of Thread connections could be interesting as well.
True, but Matter should not reinvent the wheel either.
The Z-techs have matured a lot of things right and they have lived with the invention and addition of new products, that were not even thought of at their birth.
The idea of Matter to make a common strict standard is good to some extend, but it seems that it is now so strict that it is killing progress and invent. A good example is the smart plugs that can not provide power measuring too.
So the question is will Matter open up for some room in their standard to allow for cases that have not been thought of or make it more flexible?
As you pointed out, I definitely think it would be beneficial to discuss the differences between Matter at the application layer and Thread,WiFi and Ethernet at the transport layer. Also, how Bluetooth ties into the mix as well.
I’m looking forward to this! I’d be interested to see a discussion on best practices for zigbee/thread coexistence - I’ve found some general recommendations around that in some GitHub issues but it’s not clear to me how to best act on those. In my case, I have a Yellow running Zigbee on the onboard radio and then a SkyConnect running thread-only firmware with OpenThread. I have some pairing and stability issues with my Matter-over-Thread devices (I do use an Android) but I’m hoping to avoid needing Google/Nest devices for the Thread implementation. Any guidance there and also any kind of roadmap for when using SkyConnect as a Thread border router might be supported more formally would be great.
@WallyR That is strange as there are product avail that are smart plugs that do monitoring.
I think its just interpretation as guess of course you can but both a seperate matter nodes than butcher a smart switch with the inclusion of monitoring.
Currently you are using Google to add MATTER Thread devices! Are you planning on changing this, as THREAD & there for Matter is broken in my home & others using Google Home but does works with Alexa. Google have given up trying to assist. So I’m unable to add any MATTER Thread devices to Home Assistant even though I have the Skyconnect dongle.
The Meross smart plug, as well as others, with Matter support provide the power measuring over its own app. It can’t do it over Matter, because Matter have not provided a sensor standard for it.
Same goes for Eve smart plugs.
Matter devices are using IP, weather the medium is WiFI, ethernet, or thread.
How, exactly, are users supposed to guarantee that a (thread) Matter device isn’t piggybacking off a border router’s access to the LAN to reach the open internet? With a wifi/ethernet device, it’s pretty easy to just put it on a distinct vlan to limit access.
Somehow, I don’t think Apple/Amazon/Google/etc are going to provide configuration options to tag packets from matter devices with a VLAN id. Having to manually add blocks per ipv6 address of a thread device does not seem appealing.
Yeah but the HA Team addressed this last month (or the month before).
Matter under the hood is using stuff a lot like the Zigbee clusters technology, and that’s how this is working - Eve are publishing the power information to a manufacturer specific cluster, and Home Assistant is temporarily subscribing to that cluster for Eve devices until Matter supports it natively.
EDIT:
As for the people complaining that Matter does not support this and that - like power monitoring. I suspect that was why Belkin pulled out for a bit. It was expect to arrive with the first Matter update last Spring, but that largely ended up being a bugfix to fix reliability and connection problems. The next release was more concentrating on adding more device types. Because manufacturers are desperate to get on board, they need the matter standard to focus on adding more device types, because they want to release products onto the market, which they can’t do until matter supports that device type.
It’s matter I have no home kit integration, I got the eve plug and then aqara all pulling into Hass with matter. Andrew does explains why it’s working though the HA team did a solid.
It been asked above but to me the biggest questions are around HA acting as a matter bridge. This seems a fundamental requirement for any centralised home automation system.
While most of us who are on Home Assistant might dive deep into Matter, it’s not trivial to replace dozens or hundreds of devices with Matter so I think there’s plenty of time for Matter to mature and for HA to make use of it before it becomes a bottleneck. That being said, I try to buy from manufacturers that either currently support Matter in it’s infancy now or have built in the ability to do so in the future. Inovelli is a great example of this approach, where all their Zigbee is “Matter Ready” for when that comes to maturity.
I have yet to even try Matter at all, because it’s just not as robust yet and I don’t particularly want to be an alpha tester of the system. Once the major players really start to throw their weight behind it I believe things will change rapidly and I see 2024 as a good possible year for that because with all signs pointing to what could be a red letter year in terms of a tanked economy, this is when they will want to try to innovate to boost sales.