Last month's Ikea's announcement of more than 20 new Matter-over-Thread devices felt like a much-needed breakthrough moment for the high-profile smart home standard. If Ikea—a brand with a broad, not necessarily tech-savvy customer base—is all-in on Matter, have we finally arrived at the smart home utopia that was first promised back in late 2019?
It was then, amid growing frustrations from users around smart home compatibility, that tech giants including Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung formed the Project Connected Home over IP (Project CHIP) working group, and laid out their plans to fix the chaos.
By mid-2021, Project CHIP had blossomed into Matter. The big idea was that Matter would work as your smart home’s universal translator; a common language designed to get all your connected devices talking locally and securely. If it was a Matter-certified device, it should work with any Matter-compatible platform or app, whatever the brand.
Devices with that Matter mark started arriving in late 2022, in the weeks after the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) officially released Matter 1.0 specification and opened the certification program for brands to get on board.
The trouble in those early days was that the Matter mark didn’t take the guesswork out of the equation for consumers. In fact, it added an extra layer of confusion. Amazon actually muddied the waters during its keynote presentation at the Matter 1.0 launch event when it was revealed that neither iOS nor wireless mesh network Thread would be part of its initial Alexa and Matter integration.
That was a major setback, as Thread, alongside Wi-Fi and Ethernet, was touted as a major part of Matter, offering a fast, reliable, secure, and energy-saving network protocol.
“We felt confident in Matter when it launched with version 1.0,” Tobin Richardson, president and CEO of the CSA, explained to me. “But nothing provides the real-life feedback that we needed until devices and ecosystems were in the market and being used by consumers. That first year was critical, and we began to see some immediate areas where improvement was needed.”
In that first year, if you bought a Nanoleaf Essential lightbulb, with that Matter mark on the box, and you lived in an Alexa household, you couldn’t actually add it to your Matter system.
“When the different ecosystems were deploying their Thread border routers”—the gateway that links the devices in your Thread mesh to your home’s IP network and the internet—“everyone was on a different commit, so you have all these different code bases all in production, all trying to work together,” Nanoleaf’s CEO Gimmy Chu explained to me. “And different ecosystems had a bunch of different bugs.”
Chu told me that Nanoleaf paid the price for being an early champion of Matter-over-Thread, and the smart lighting specialist ultimately ditched Thread in favor of Matter-over-Wi-Fi after that first wave of products.