It’s very important to note that this is not the entire brand joining, this is three specific products which already use Matter over Thread and thus would be interoperable anyway.
Still a win for Home Assistant to have a big brand like Aqara want to play ball at all.
if they are supporting the current Matter/Thread devices hopefully they will do the same for future devices, especially (if and) when they start to deprecate their Zigbee devices.
Oh yes for sure. Wasn’t saying otherwise. Was only pointing out the details because the way the program worked previously, it was kind of an all or nothing thing. And thus, Aqara joining could be taken as a sign that they are going to make everything completely open and interoperable and work perfectly directly with HA. I don’t think that’s the case.
This is still a very important step. Open standards may be the most important part of home automation, but the second most important part might well be respect.
Go back just a year or two and HA and open source in general were basically ignored in the market. Now things are changing.
Every company that partners with HA further cements HA and open standards in general as a legitimate / major player in the automation market that manufacturers ignore at their own peril. The more that happens, the more products will be developed with open standards in mind.
