Would matter make IoT hub redundant?

[jkp]

The future is…hubs?

I know for the last two years or so it has looked like hubs were going to be less important in the future of the smart home industry. Better battery power management for WiFi, Thread as a more reliable substitute for Bluetooth, and the introduction of stealth hubs inside voice assistants seemed to create a trajectory away from brand-specific hubs. But now we have Matter. And just as the Philips hue bridge made it possible to add a bunch of strongly featured Zigbee devices to many different control platforms, it’s starting to look like matter will mean homes with several “little hubs“, or more specifically, “matter bridges.“ They will basically work just like Hue Bridges. They will create their own mini networks with devices connected to them, mostly Zigbee, and then you will add that brid…