It’s been near-on 3 years since the Matter / CHIP standard was first announced - and it’s been delayed 3 times since then. But it looks increasingly like Matter will finally ship this Winter. Being developed semi-publicly and published to GitHub, the Connectivity Standards Alliance behind Matter have just published version 1 of Matter to a public code repository.
Matter promises to fix one large problem consumers face when purchasing smart home products: understanding whether devices from various makers will be compatible with each other. In that sense, Matter is not a full technology stack but rather an application layer which makes communication between products easier. Because of its focus, Matter doesn’t look like a full automation stack when compared to Z-Wave but, with major names from Amazon to Apple attached to the project, it’s likely to become a dominant standard all the same. After all, it’ll benefit from the same problem it’s trying to solve: consumers ultimately don’t want to understand the technology and most won’t recognise whether Matter is truly their best option.
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