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.
Four years ago, overlooking a canal in Amsterdam, the smart home industry collectively launched Matter, the one interoperability standard to rule them all. Heralded as the solution to the industry’s struggles, Matter was built on open standards and existing technologies and is the result of years of collaboration between traditional rivals, including Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung.
Matter promised an end to walled gardens and ecosystem lock-in. It promised to make a smart home device, like a lock, lightbulb, or sensor, easy to buy and set up. It promised you could choose any brand, use any platform, no expertise required — it would just work.
“Matter long-term won’t be successful until everybody can use it at parity. That’s the goal. And all the companies know that.” — Tobin Richardson, CSA
It didn’t. Today, Matter is still not there. Adding devices to your smart home is still cumbersome and finicky; sharing them across ecosystems can be unreliable, and some features users expect aren’t part of Matter and still require the manufacturer’s app. But, based on what I saw at the Unify conference in Austin, Texas, last week, Matter is much closer to its promise of a simple, reliable, interoperable smart home.
Following a rocky launch and years of broken promises, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) designated 2025 as the year to fix Matter — and I have seen significant improvements. This year at Unify, the CSA’s first public-facing event since the Amsterdam launch of Matter, version 1.6 of the spec was announced.
The most significant new feature, Joint Fabric, will let you create a single smart home network that can be controlled by any Matter platform — which is the Matter we thought we were getting all along. The question is, will the platforms adopt it? And that’s a question that has been at the heart of Matter’s struggles to date. It turns out that corralling an industry is not easy.
A panel at Unify hosted by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy featuring representatives from Google, Samsung, Homey/LG, and CableLabs. Here, Daniel Moneta of Samsung answers a question about Samsung appliances not being part of Matter, saying they are focused on offering a great first-party experience through SmartThings. Image: CSA
The mood at the three-day conference was optimistic but realistic. There was widespread recognition that Matter hasn’t done what it set out to do, but that the work is being done to get it there.
I asked Tobin Richardson, the CEO of the CSA, whether he believed Matter had achieved that initial promise that you could buy a device with a Matter logo and it would be easy to set up and use on any platform. “We’re on the path,” he hedged. “In some ways, yes. But in some places, universally and globally, we still have a few more milestones to get there.”
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