Apologies if this was not more publicly known.
We have Z-Wave OTA support in the Hub, and it is available to Customer Beta users for the limited devices that we support, but there were two problems that we had:
- Dynamic download of the OTA images for the Z-Wave devices: This particular item is a combination of many little things, but the gist of it is this. The current behavior, for Zigbee as well, the new images/firmware for the devices are only provided when releasing a new Hub Firmware. Unlike Matter, there is no ecosystem level infrustrcuture (Zigbee or Z-Wave) to obtain new images, and we would need to work with the manufacturer on this. However, we solved the original part of this problem by adding the capability for the Hub to download new images for Matter devices from the internet, you could argue that we could host a server for Zigbee and Z-Wave images, and that is something we could talk, but the bigger problem is the next item.
- Quality issues observed with OTA support for Z-Wave devices: Based on our limited testing with the devices that supported OTA, we discovered critical quality issues that made the Z-Wave OTA a bigger headache for us to put in our roadmap. We observed anything from devices getting bricked because the manufacturer had not planned for a jump from an older version to the latest version, and other issues where the network information was lost, and the user needed to repair their devices. There was also plenty of success, but the numbers were not convincing for us to invest more resources/effort.
Ultimately, we are slightly concerned with issue number 2 coming up for Matter devices as well, but we have restricted OTA to only CSA Certified software releases as an additional round of validation, but clearly, it’s not 100% guaranteed that Certified releases will be without issues. That is something we are monitoring.