The article discusses expectations for smart home announcements at the upcoming IFA tech show in Berlin. While companies may unveil new smart speakers, cameras and robot vacuums, the smart home remains fragmented as the Matter interoperability standard has yet to fully deliver on integrating devices. The author argues the industry needs to provide more utility than novelty by allowing different smart devices to work together seamlessly. Examples mentioned include lights notifying users of doorbell activity or a robot vacuum taking on multiple household chores autonomously. Overall, the smart home needs solutions that are essential rather than just novel if consumers are to see the value beyond the initial cool factor.
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A year ago at Berlin’s IFA tech trade show (think European CES), Verge reporter Jon Porter witnessed a Google Nest Hub control an Apple HomeKit smart plug.
Despite being developed by the biggest names in the industry — Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, and more — Matter has yet to deliver on its main promise.
We’re expecting news from robot vacuum giants Ecovacs and Roborock, and smaller smart home players such as Eve, Nanoleaf, SwitchBot, Aqara, Aeotec, and Yeelight are all on the show floor.
But what’s more important is the long and boring task of getting them to seamlessly work together to create a home that’s actually smart, not just a collection of disparate gadgets that solve specific problems.
The smart home standard introduces a secure, basic communication layer that allows for interoperability and local control.
It moves us away from proprietary protocols, dubious security standards, and cloud dependency to the point where — if appropriately implemented — we can feel comfortable allowing technology intimate access to our homes.
Saved 84% of original text.
Will Apple sell more devices if they fully support the standard? Will Google?
If not, there’s your answer.
Apple isn’t really a good example, they’re pushing the standard. I don’t know of any smart devices they make themselves besides the homepod.
Will Apple sell more devices if they fully support the standard?
I stand to the question. Apple is pretty famous for saying what people want to hear, and not actually doing much.
My cynical interpretation of the right-to-repair announcement is: we know Europe is gonna cram this down our throats, so let’s try and get control of the narrative while there’s still time.
The big device manufacturers DON’T WANT INTEROPERABILITY. They want you nailed down to their ecosystem and hit you with planned obsolescence. Like most anything else in the economy, they want premium pricing. If you adopt open standards, then you’re competing with everyone else but now on price. The majority of device makers don’t want to do that. THAT is the problem with the smart home.
Are there any open source smart home technologies? (For this reason but also for privacy’s sake)
Home assistant and zigbee/z-wave (also Bluetooth) resolve a lot of issues people have with smart home kit. Matter/Threads, discussed in the article, is supposed to be an open standard to make fancier kit from the big companies work together seamlessly, we just aren’t quite there yet.
See:
People talk a lot about home-assistant but there is another part to that setup; the devices themselves and the firmware they run.
If you stick to ESP8266 devices mostly you can use things like Tasmota and ESPHome. Zigbee/Z-wave is good I’ve heard but nothing compares to the interoperability of good 'ol WiFi.
It costs like less than $15 for a Sonoff Basic R2, another $5 for a knock off FTDI USB programmer. With a tiny bit of soldering you can put some programming pins on the Sonoff and flash Tasmota. From there you can use Mosquitto to control it, or the HTTP API, both open and interoperable protocols.
Technology throttled by human greed
We probably have the tech, know-how and capability to build a permanent massive orbiting space station with a highly efficient way to get there and back.
But we’re too busy fighting wars and trying to figure out how to screw each other out of another dollar. Most of our human energy and efforts are spent either trying to swindle money out of others or trying to protect ourselves from being swindled or just being swindled.
Is supporting this open a standard a law? It sounds like it could be an EU law, and it being one is the only reason companies would do it.
It’s definitely not a law. Codifying this in law could stiffle innovation.
Is there some reason just using z-wave and avoiding everything cloud is not just fine?
Seems like matter is more trying to resolve zigbee issues. Or am I missing something?
I went Z-Wave years ago based on some arbitrary feature (the Zigbee network size limitation, I think?) and have been very happy (and cloud-independent). However, Z-Wave device do tend to be more expensive, and it can be challenging to find some devices. Smart Z-Wave bulbs seem to have disappeared from the market, for instance.
I still have X10 stuff but need to move to something else at least for some things. I liked what I saw about z-wave in terms of being on another band from wifi and Bluetooth and also being more secure.
Then again I could wait some more too or just go z-wave and change later if needed.
So a couple of things. Z-Wave is a proprietary protocol (developed by a single company called Zensys) and is a closed ecosystem, so personally, I’m not a fan of it. And it’s not great choice for interoperability either.
Zigbee on the other hand, is an open standard (IEEE 802.15.4), made by the Zigbee alliance, comprising of major tech companies. The Zigbee alliance later became the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), who are the ones behind Matter. Which is why it appears as if Matter is trying to resolve Zigbee issues.
In actuality though, Matter is trying to proposition itself as a generic standard for the modern IoT world, because things have changed significantly since the times when the Zigbee and Z-Wave protocols were conceived (late 90s - early '00s). The main thing that’s changed is that low-power and cheap system-on-a-chip (SOCs) and single board computers (SBCs) have taken over the world by storm, which has enabled manufacturers to push out cheap home automation products quickly. Making home automation products is no longer a traditional embedded systems and specialized electronics play, where you had to invest a lot of RnD into designing complex circuits, pay for a Z-Wave license etc. Nowadays, even a kid could make their own system using a Raspberry Pi and say Python, without needing any knowledge of low-level protocols or languages.
As a result, the home automation world is filled with too many manufacturers and products, all trying to do their own thing and in-effect, building several closed ecosystems, even though they’re all basically using the same protocols behind the scenes. Plus you also have the existing Zigbee and Z-Wave products.
So before Matter came into the picture, several manufacturers started making their own centralized hubs, as a means for interoperability, like Samsung’s SmartThings, or Apple’s HomeKit etc. Some even have their own closed hubs meant for their own ecosystem of devices, like the Philips Hue bridge. As a result, some homes may even have multiple hubs, with overlapping functionality.
Matter aims to unify all of that. So instead of Philips doing their own thing, instead of Samsung coaxing manufactures to make their systems compatible with SmartThings, instead of manufacturers kissing Apple’s ass to support their products, instead of x company making some half-baked bridging app for y company because the specs haven’t been fully documented or they simply don’t care… we have Matter. Matter aims to solve that mess, at least, on paper. It would still require manufacturers to actually buy into the idea and support the protocol, but at least it’s better than working individually with Samsung and Apple and Amazon etc, or reinventing the wheel and doing their own thing.
As far as I know z-wave has been open for years. Is there something not so about that?
I guess I stand corrected-ish. I’ve always ignored Z-Wave because it was a closed ecosystem. But upon reading more into it, seems like it’s only partially open. They only opened certain parts of the spec for interoperability in late 2016, the standard was ratified by the ITU in Dec 2019, and they formed the non-profit Z-Wave Alliance only in 2020. They apparently made the source code available end of last year, but it’s only available to the Z-Wave Alliance members.
So, still not ideal IMO, but better than what it was a decade ago I guess.
