GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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Matter, the smart home interoperability standard, might finally get a feature that should have been there from day one: a single shared Matter network managed by multiple ecosystems. With this feature, called Joint Fabric, smart devices added to the network will be controllable by any authorized platform — Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and the rest. No need to “share” your smart light between apps; set it up once, and control it everywhere. It’s like your smart home is a joint bank account and your platforms of choice all have signing authority.
Joint Fabric is part of the new Matter 1.6 spec announced this week at Unify, the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s inaugural conference, in Austin, Texas. While there are no new device types in the spec, there are a few quality-of-life updates.
There’s now support for full NFC setup, which eliminates the need to scan the QR code and lets you just tap to pair. With this, you can also pair a device before powering it on — which could be useful when installing smart bulbs or a wired smart switch.
Also new is Thermostat Suggestions, a standardized way for these devices to communicate across ecosystems. It allows an ecosystem to send a time-based “recommendation” that the thermostat can defer or adopt based on input from other platforms.
The idea here is that if you manually change the temperature on one platform, the thermostat will ignore an automated request that arrives a few moments later. Also, your Apple Home automation won’t override a utility savings program you signed up for, and preferences like optimizing for air quality will be recognized across services.
You add a device once, and it appears across all authorized ecosystems
But back to that Joint Fabric thing. Besides sporting a name that fits better in a ’70s road-trip movie than a smart-home standard, Joint Fabric is designed to improve on one of Matter’s core features, multi-admin. This is where you should be able to set up a device in one smart home app and then use it on any other Matter-compatible platform.
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