I remember seeing a couple smart home guys on YouTube proclaiming how wonderful Matter was going to be, and how everyone should immediately begin switching their smart homes over to the new standard.
To see Matter essentially failing after a year just means, to me, that we are following the same script as for everything else. Folks let themselves get hyped up by marketers, and then slavishly follow those marketers into rathole after rathole - while throwing money at the marketers the whole time for the âprivilegeâ of diving into the rathole.
Fortunately, Iâm not a rathole-follower.
Who knows. Perhaps by the time my Smartthings hub and Zigbee/Zwave devices start to age out, Matter will have become something useful. But for now I certainly donât see any advantage whatsoever to adding yet more routing devices to my configuration, or purchasing new devices that are problematic.
I have several Matter Devices, none of them have been problematic once I got them connected.
For me, the biggest advantage has been the ease of adding new, and often less expensive, devices to my HomeKit set up. Being able to use my SwitchBot curtainbots in Apple Home is great, and something I didnât have before.
Iâm also finding my aqara Devices added to SmartThings via a Matter bridge now much more reliable in smartthings than they were when connected directly. The same is true for my SwitchBot devices, which are now connected locally through a matter bridge to smartthings, rather than cloud to cloud.
But I am not using matter for hue on any platform: I just get way more features through the native integrations.
So Iâve definitely gotten some benefits from Matter in the last year. But nowhere near as many devices as I expected to have to choose from, and way more confusion. Plus way too much trouble onboarding to multiple platforms.
But once I get a device connected to the platform I want to use it with, itâs been good.
I have a half dozen Matter over WiFi Devices. Wiz color bulbs, Tapo plug and Tapo dimmer. I donât have any Matter over Thread devices.
The Wiz bulbs were originally plain old WiFi with a c2c integration. They were upgraded to Matter a few months ago with a firmware update from Wiz.
Pre Matter the Wiz bulbs with are all installed outdoors would occasionally go off line. Since the Matter update and connecting them directly to ST they have been more reliable.
The Tapo devices are new so I canât speak to there reliability.
There is a small learning curve with pairing Matter devices to multiple platforms.
The biggest problem I had was trying to pair the Tapo Dimmer to my ST Station. It kept timing out with an error message. So I manually installed the âMatter Switchâ driver on the Station and the Tapo Dimmer paired on the 1st try. With my v2 hubs the âMatter Switchâ drive was automatically installed during pairing.
Maybe. But hubspace is an entirely cloud-based system, even though itâs Wi-Fi. If the Internet goes out, the whole system goes down. (Even the security pieces.)
Matter can compete on being local, but theyâve got to get their act together.
Some will: itâs an easy difference to explain. If the two systems are equally easy to install and use, But matter works locally and hub space does not, there will be people willing to pay A little more. We already have that now with people who shop primarily on price and those who donât. Choice is good.
I continue to see people use the âif the Internet goes down it stops workingâ argument. Are the other ISPs that bad? I lose power more than I lose Internet, and I lose power about once every 2 years.
It varies a lot from location to location. Many people lose Internet more often than they think, even if for only a few minutes at a time, they just donât realize it because they arenât trying to do something right in that moment or because they were away from home at the time.
I myself live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so a region with good tech infrastructure, and my ISP is a major company. But I am also quadriparetic and spend most of my life in one of two rooms. And Iâm very dependent on my Home Automation systems to do everything from turn on the lights to change the channel on the television. I always notice when the Internet goes out. Also, I get messages from my medical monitoring system that it has switched over to cellular.
I get those messages two or three times a month. I have friends who live in a more rural area about 40 miles away, and their Internet connection goes out several times a day.
It also depends on the use cases youâre running. In the US, a security system cannot be UL listed unless it offers cellular backup, because the consequences of not being able to get the messages through is considered so significant, even if it happens very rarely.
So itâs one of those things that will matter to some people, and not to others.
Yeah, that looks like a really nice device. But we will have to wait and see what actually gets delivered, although aqara has been good on that.
Itâs also interesting that theyâre offering a smartplug which will also be a thread border router. I assume thatâs to help out some of their older hubs which donât support thread, but now do support matter.
Today, the internet is so affordable that everyone can have automatic failover to cellular for their entire network if they want to and have the knowledge to set it up properly. I have Frontier fiber, but I also have automatic cellular failover, so the problem of losing internet is not as much of an issue anymore. T-Mobile Home Internet is $30.00 a month if you have a regular cell plan with them.
I find myself despising âour product will soon do _______!â Corporations will promise virtually anything in order to sell their wares, and somehow they are under no obligation to fulfill those promises.
Iâm becoming cynical⌠or perhaps simply realistic. The moment someone says âbelieve me/usâ on anything, I walk away. The Matter failure of 2023 is just this exact lesson. How can you have something called a standard, yet the major players - and even the creators - of that very standard implement it in ways that prevent accomplishment of the stated goal of creating the standard in the first place?
