Which team are you on?! 👀

Team Matter here. Regarding the questions (paraphrasing), "Will Google Nest Hub show the same information for their own thermostat as that for another brand.", the answer is, "Probably not." The Matter standard covers bottom-denominator features only, and even many of those features are optional. In order to get a product certified, all of the mandatory features must be supported but optional ones are not required to be supported.

If it makes buying hardware easier I'm all for it. Right now choosing a Zigbee device is kind of a mine field, with some of them not working well with others depending on unknown reasons (looking at you Aqara) or not supporting binding, or not routing properly (hue ..), being outright dangerous uncertified mains powered devices and so on. Maybe if thread gets any traction we'll finally see some good devices be released in Europe, instead of all the good stuff being US only. I want Inovelli blue switches :(

The most important thing is Privacy. Whatever it is needs On-Premise control and storage of data that doesn’t need any external connection and the ability to ensure no external connection.

Glad to see the realists perspective on Matter being put into a video - far to many people seem to thing Matter will solve all their problems when its released, but we don't even know how well things will actually work together and what devices we will actually have to use (and when).

Part of me is skeptical since the market is already pretty saturated with proprietary WiFi devices now that have already been selling well enough manufacturers might not se any benefit in implementing a new protocol. It's a standard we needed 3 or 4 years ago. On the other hand, I don't think the overall market penetration is all that deep yet. And part of the reason for that is probably the perception of too many incompatible ecosystems and the questionable privacy of so many cloud services. If enough people realize that this kind of compatibility is even possible (and I have my doubts, hearing people ask questions like "does this charger work with Samsung?" or "does anyone have an Android USB cable?") it might open up a lot of potential users.

I think Matter could be useful in many ways: 1) As you have already mentioned, Apple’s HomeKit will benefit from increased number of compatible devices. On boarding process for Matter devices was largely borrowed from Apple. HomeKit is the only mainstream platform with local control (Google Home, Amazon and SmartThings are currently cloud based). 2) We could finally get local integration for Tuya devices. Although, their devices could be locally controlled through the Tuya APP, all integrations (including the one for the Home Assistant) are currently cloud based. 3) Experience should become more consistent between different platforms - in short and medium term it could accelerate smart home adoption by general public. Some remarks about Google: Currently it fails to provide “upper hand” to its own product even when it is absolutely appropriate and necessary. You can’t see weekly or monthly view of your Google calendar on your nest hubs. There were no button to add the event to your Google calendar on the announcement page for the recent Google event. Those are just some random examples. Google Nest Hubs are currently 100% cloud based devices - when internet goes down you could do nothing with it. I do not expect Matter to fix this issue. I would assume, they could become Matter controllers, but I would not expect them to work without the internet.

Great overview, you really covered the topic well. I am slightly more optimistic than you (only slightly) about the promise of Matter. Maybe someday Google will get to 50% of the functionality of what HA is now... But for me the biggest payout is a widespread adoption of Thread. My biggest issue is due to the physical layout of the area I need to cover with sensors. I have multiple large gaps that I need to send a signal across where I cannot have a Zigbee repeater in between. Zigbee's limitation of a single controller becomes a hard stop for me in several areas. Thread addresses this issue by allowing me to travers the open distance with Wifi and simply placing Border routers at each end - in theory providing 100% coverage where I need it. This will be a game changer once I can start purchasing Thread based sensors.

Thx for the head up here. I am full with you on the reservation we must have regarding those large companies. I am a dedicated Homeassistant fan, so for me no big changes there. However joining one open source standard that is robust and reliable (safe etc.) is an opportunity for the manufacturing companies of smart home devices, this allows for more competition, hopefully leading to better quality and better prices.

Been waiting for this! Thanks

Are you team Matter or team Antimatter? I'm team Inthemiddlematter. If it works the way it's promised it'll be great, even us HA users have to rely on commercial devices, like smart locks, so anything that makes integrating those sorts of devices work better/easier w/HA is a win. But it's still a wait and see thing.

Interesting stuff as always, thanks Lewis!

Very informational, thanks Lewis! 😀

You said it yourself: matter is untested, so whoever is in the camp of "it doesn't matter" is just wrong because you can't determine whether it matters or not until it matures. For now I think there's only one actual camp of people that should exist: the "we'll see how it goes" camp. You can't have an opinion on something that hasn't yet been proven one way or the other since there's no data to base your opinion off of

You’re my favorite HA creator! ❤ I’d love to see more tutorials from you because those are my favorites as a beginner.

Years ago I got caught out sticking to one proprietary platform (Control4). Nickel and diming me for years. This is entirely why I now have Home Assistant (HA). So I don't have to care about (yet another protocol) like Matter. As a new HA user I am still buying Zigbee 3.0 devices - many of which are plummeting in price. Some now are absolute bargains. This allows me to build a smart home so much more cheaply than a few years ago. When matter devices I need become available (or Zigbee ones are no longer available) that suit my needs, I will simply get another USB stick to control a Thread mesh or upgrade to a joint Zigbee/Matter USB stick. This is entirely why I recently built a HA server. So I can run several protocols (if necessary) and won't have worry about inter connectivity or a home auto company like Control4 screwing me over ever again. 🙂

Having put in a Nest thermostat about a year before I started getting into Home Assistant, I'm really hoping to see a software update to the thermostat to support Matter integration. Kind of think this would be good for the Nest and Google Home Mini's I've got as well. It's not going to significantly improve their ability to work as smart devices, but as output devices for things like media from Home Assistant, it would be much appreciated. (Granted a more capable media player that's not limited to a single track would be a significant improvement for Home Assistant as well...)

Thanks, great video!

Just wonderful, we are looking forward to Matter.

Within 1 year I moved ALL of my devices from "3rd party cloud" based to FULLY local - mainly based on ESPHome or other Arduino/ESPnow thingis ;-) If I was to change all of them to "the new best product" I would have to spend lots of money and so on. Majority of devices are not compatible with Thread protocol anyway so yes, we will have to do "some shopping" ;-)

The most used function for me is voice control, which is the weakness of Home Assistant. Although Home Assistant tends to operate everything locally, but inevitably we need to count on Google home to control all devices behind Home Assistant. Matter doesn't help at all from this point of view since its main achievement is better local and interoperability.

I am on the fence. I bought a new house this year, after years of apartment living, so I have a "greenfield" environment to start fresh. Sure I've got some Zigbee smart plugs and bulbs, using a USB stick on Home Assistant (I've already pre-ordered SkyConnect to replace the Z-Wave support of my current device with Thread), along with a mix of various other vendors and their cloud-enabled products. I've decided to hold off buying smart switches for lighting and the like until Spring. I suspect that the 2023 CES in January will feature a load of Matter products, and I will use that as the basis for if I wait for those items to start shipping, or find what I'm looking for in Zigbee/Z-Wave (one of the things I've had difficulty finding is a wall switch/fan speed controller for use in North America, not many options out there).

Makes my Friday every week. 😂

Thanks for explaining it so well, totally understand what to expect now! Shame you didn't throw a few knob references in! 🤣

I think the main issue is, that it will likely take quite some time before we see a decent amount of native thread devices. As long as matter compatibility means only a firmware upgrade to the bridge while the devices still use proprietary zigbee features the benefit is rather limited.. ;)

If I've understood thread correctly, devices could very well be cloud locked and stop responding if it cannot call home. I like the idea of matter but at times it feels like it's made for google to be able to grab even more data.. I know for sure that I'll be very careful when it comes to joining border routers to the network.

I look forward to matter and thread as a protocol upgrade interoperability-wise, even with HA and z2m. But the old devices are here, and I'll hopefully not need to replace them for a while. So I'll be stuck with yet another gateway on top of everything 😂 Biggest impact will be for new deployments. That can be huge. I'd not buy anything else.

Great video, zwave has like 3000 devices. Going to take a while before this becomes practical.

Nice video Lewis! 8:22 sums it up perfectly for Home Assistant users. At best, Matter hopes to achieve a subset of what Home Assistant has already done. As a Home Assistant user, Matter doesn't matter to me. For non-HomeAssistant users (those poor bastards) I can maybe see the value proposition of Matter. But if I were them, I'd still just migrate to Home Assistant instead of placing all my hopes and dreams on some new protocol to fix all the shortcomings of my dogshit (by comparison to Home Assistant) platform. Mini rant incoming... I was a SmartThings user for years, and I can't tell you how much easier Home Assistant is to use. Yes EASIER. Everyone says Home Assistant is hard to use, but once you get it working, it works perfectly. As in fast and reliably. Everything else (like SmartThings) is easy to initially get working, but impossible to get working WELL. Usually because some shitty cloud server is down somewhere. And then you waste tons of time trying and failing to improve it from there. That second batch of wasted time and frustration is too often overlooked by people who say things like "SmartThings is easy".

Thank you. Very informative. I'm interested to see what happens with legacy devices.

It doesn't matter to me. I have great interoperability with zigbee at the moment and I have a wide selection of vendors. The only vendor hardware that I have had to get rid of was a hue motion sensor. Everything else is rock solid including aqara which I see a number of people are pointing out as the odd one out. Matter won't change anything for me, for now. I'm going to sit back and get the popcorn.

Thanks for this -- interesting stuff. But, for us dummies, it's not clear to me if Matter is going to come out with its own app, or dashboard (like SmartThings or Google Home) or if it will work in the background, basically connecting up any or all of these platforms. Please let me know if i missed something along the way.

Matter sounds good but my current system has local control and while integration has been a little challenging, I've been able to jump those hurdles. A few years from now this might Matter to me.😁

Apparently as human beings we have a problem and that of communication, such as when someone has a different language from the other and they cannot communicate. Well, we are implementing that in our technological world, since by having different protocols and not establishing one as a universal base, we will be with this problem for life.

I predict you are being too skeptical about Matter. I began working in the networking business when IBM had its own OS, it's own networking protocols, it's own everything. For example it had its own financial modeling software. DEC, HP, and other major computer vendors did the same thing. Even email on IBM couldn't be sent to an HP client. In general the wiring and connectors for terminals were unique to each vendor's platform. When TCP/IP came out, it was seen as a toy. But certain vendors like Sun and Cisco embraced TCP/IP fully. Sun embraced Unix. They became very popular and all of a sudden major applications like Oracle and SAP started releasing their software on Sun first. HP, DEC, and IBM started offering TCP/IP but they oriented their good stuff toward their own platforms. But the price of TCP/IP and Unix became so affordable and the availability of first-class applications on those platforms that it killed proprietary everything. Now we see some semi-walled gardens like Android and iOS, but even these platforms have a certain level of interoperability. Yes, Google will figure out a way to keep you in their ecosystem but it won't be by dumbing down Matter devices not made by Google. They'll need to create an even better doorbell because they'll want people who use HomeKit to prefer their devices. I guarantee that Matter and Thread won't bring harmonic convergence and peace and love and solve climate change and end world hunger. But I think in 5 years you'll agree with me that home automation and interoperability will resemble the evolution of a broad computing and networking infrastructure and proprietary-ness will take a back seat The winners will be you and me. Also I predict that Home Assistant will become very niche because the need for a lingua franca home automation platform will be greatly diminished. Meet mortals won't need to program, debug, and spend hours scouring through forums just to get a nice multivendor dashboard and some decent cross-vendor automations.

Most company's exist to make money. Most company's (ALL) want to make more money. I get it. But thaat means they are going to promote their product over everyone else's. That will prompt them to make there matter product appear better then any other's. For that reason alone i think home assistant will be here to stay as it still allows more products to work together then just about any other platform out there.

Hello, philips hue has now released official matter update'. Any video coming about it? I have high hopes about it, as regards the alexa limitation with one hue bridge. Will matter solve this ? Muliple hue bridges is now possible with alexa with matter update ? Thx

I’m a SmartThings user, which is in turmoil right now! Which devices will work with the new edge drivers is crazy! Put thread/matter in the mix is even more crazy. I think the V2 hub, which I have doesn’t support it put V3 does, Come On Man, I don’t know what to expect after the New Year, very unhappy with Samsung!

For HA users including myself: I’m hoping to see Matter result in Nabu Casa being able to extremely simplify commissioning and interoperability, equalize functionality across brands with same device types, and overall significantly reduce the energy it takes to research a product to know if it does what you need and will work with X and Y.

Missed out on the easy dad joke titling this video "Should matter matter to you?" Or "Does it (M)atter?"

ive been holding off jumping into the smart game fully, as no one supllier does everything i want( I dont think so anyway). im looking for reasonably priced plugs, bulbs and switches, but want it all off line/ local. is there a supplier that can do this for me? thanks for any help

I'll believe it when I see it, can't see them all playing nicely, it's not in their interest, regardless of how much bluster they make about it

Does Amber allow us to use matter, zigsbee and zwave at the same time?

Damn... Was about to post that you missed a trick with the title, should be "Does Matter matter?" or "Does it Matter?" and then right at the end you slipped it in! As another commenter already said, it's the same group that gave us Zigbee, with exactly the same aims, just now it will be certified to be cross-compatible, exactly like Z-Wave, and therefore probably cost more for exactly the same device from exactly the same people! Personally I'll take the "wait and see what they actually deliver" attitude for a long time before even considering buying a Matter product. Thanks to the great work of the Home Assistant team and the community around it, we can already achieve everything they aim to deliver. The one potential upside if it takes off could be more products available which don't rely on a cloud subscription to work, but I suspect they'll find a way to keep milking that revenue stream...

It feels like Matter is promising what Zigbee should have delivered, but competitors don't like to play nicely with each other.

I noticed you have an Aqara G3 Camera on screen while you are talking about Home Assistant at 8:42. Have you been able to get that to show a camera feed in Home Assistant? I have been unable to and would love any tips if so!

I am building my smart home starting nexst year (ish) when i move into my new apartment. so i am hoping matter will make it easier for me to set up and use home Assistant. So hopefully matter will make home assistant intigration easier and faster,

Good explanation, I honestly can’t see this being anything different. Companies don’t want to invite competitors I just can’t see this going anywhere.

I switched from smart things V3 to Hubitat for a variety of reasons including local control, etc. I have heard that smart things have support for thread and matter in their latest releases. So I think I might just set it up, let it update to the latest version. Then if I do get any matter devices I hope that I can expose those to my Hubitat hub and control them from there. I do not want two hubs doing things.

It doesn't matter to me. I however did pre-order the HA sky connect as I only rely on the IKEA hub and want to get rid of the extra hub.

I’m confused why device interoperability is a concern. I thought as long as they can work with home assistant, that’s all that matters. Clearly I’m wrong, but what am I missing? If you use HA, doesn’t a action on a smart switch trigger an HA integration that in turn changes the state of the light? This is the last of a few videos on matter I’ve watched. I don’t use home assistant yet, but I have a yellow.

“The good thing about standards is that there is a lot of them for you to choose from”. Comes Matter 😄

Been waiting for someone to actually face up and admit that the big players are going to...STITCH YOU UP! 🎉🎉🎉 No "matter" what happens I agree with you. Functionality is going to take a hit as Google won't want use to use Amazon and Sonoff won't like Aqara having full control over all our devices. Their going to cut functionality similar to what happened with Zigbee. It's a nice idea but some of us have been on this roundabout before and it's not that good especially when the big boys don't play nicely...

I am old enough to have seen TCP-IP defeat the ISO-OSI stack, notwithstanding IBM (...that IBM) support. Now this story of Matter+Google+Amazon somehow resemble that story: a neat design trying to overcome a well established one, HA+Zigbee(+MQTT?). Are advantages enough and real to make iot companies REALLY jump on the new bandwagon?

Market failure of home iot occurred not because of lack of a mesh network protocol or interoperability standard. It failed because of the the manufacturers attitude/behavior/practices. Anyone worth their snot could tell you that igniting home iot as a new product category and feature was only ever going to work with open interoperability, and yet again they tried vendor lock in and surprised pikachu faced when customers simply balked at the experience and said fuck no. An open standard for that only eases the implementation of interoperability. In truth home assistant and project like it have been using whatever device specific interface is available eg. HTTP get/set or whatever and delivering what everybody knew home iot must have from the beginning - interoperability, whether standardized or not. Even google, Amazon, Apple stood no chance at producing even a single product that could be really considered ‘smart home’ without interoperability with other manufacturers devices and they bloody well knew it before they started. Here we are with voice assistants that can do basically fuck all. The existence of matter and the manner in which it came to be is an embarrassment.

So, I wanna get started with smart lighting locally. Should I go for home assistant now or wait a few more months till matter gets sorted out?

I’m in the team of, it doesn’t matter. But I’m all for an easy way to have everything local in HA.

Quick question: where did you get those Matter animations from? From the CSA website? Cuz I can’t find it

Matter gives HA users a work around for Google, and alexa without need for making developer accounts or paying monthly ransoms to use our smart home.

Thanks for this video. Athom is releasing a new Homey Pro that will support the new Matter:

Using the Nest Thermostat without the cloud would be perfect

That will be a big deal if it's more reliable than zwave or zigbee. It works well, but I still need to reset and reconnect some devices from time to time. Fine, if you have a few devices, unacceptable for a complete home...

How does one determine if a device is a “cloud device” I’m on HomeKit so most of my stuff in made by eve which is privacy focus. But if I start adding matter devices then how could I tell his those devices are talking to cloud servers?

Team Antimatter! Seriously, I'm too much of a n00b to have an informed opinion, but it's intriguing.

Great video, as always. I am sorry, but I am not buying the whole matter sales tactics. I cannot believe big companies like Samsung and Google will give a tado thermostat the same functions like a Nest , or allow your Samsung washing machine to have all the function available locally. It is a shame. Companies will sell so much more devices if they allow 2 simple things. Local control. and compatibility with other brands. But hey, where is the money in that :) . Only one Smart Home for me . Home Assistant.

so this is more like replacing MQTT with Matter rather than the radio standard (eg Zigbee, WiFi, zWave).

Tengo una pregunta. Los dispositivo HomeKit de empresas que ya NO actualizan o No fabrican sus productos, pasarán a poder usarse como Matter? Por ejemplo tengo 10 enchufes inteligentes compatibles con HomeKit de la empresa Koogeek. Si esta empresa no actualiza a Matter. Que pasara con esos enchufes HomeKit ? O al ser compatibles con HomeKit y HomeKit ser compatible con Matter, serán automáticamente compatibles con Matter?

I prefer Mind over Matter. I'm still waiting to see what becomes of it. I like that it is going to be somewhat backwards compatible.

🔥

I switched to home assistant about a year ago from smart things, and about 90% of my devices are ZigBee the rest WiFi. I'm against buying products from the big techs, even though you buy their product you don't own it, like my bloody ring door bell, only cloud based system I have, and can't wait to get rid of it. So no matter.

do you think devices that are matter certified could also say they are certified for Alexa and other brands because they support matter

What is a rooter?

Zigbee or Esphome for me

this is the video from you that I was waiting on ;-) Let's see where this goes (yes this is a comment before even watching :D) Update, as I now watched the video: First off, well explained! really clear for everyone and indeed not a big deal for HA users like us. My biggest "fear" is like you said at the end, that they announce it with a lot of noise, however, I can't shake the feeling that this will become a Zigbee, let's make it so we can make our closed ecosystem again, story. When you do a quick google search, you'll also learn that the same companies who where responsible for Zigbee (The Zigbee Alliance) actually just changed their name to CSA, so how can you guarantee that you're not having the same issues again.... Anyhow, regardless of all that, if all works out, and we see mass adoption in devices in the next 3-5 years, then we're looking at a bright (hopefully) future, at least until the next standard. Great video, keep it up!

Thanks for the great video. I'm failing to see how Matter is functionally different from Zigbee. Is there anything in the certification that requires devices meeting the standard to function with each other exactly as they do with their native ecosystems? If not, then the standard is not really a standard and something like Home Assistant is still required to bring everything together. I just don't see what additional value this brings to the market.

Matter is already here it's called home assistant.

Do I need a matter hub even when I use HA? :) I don't get it? Like a conbee stick

I am sure that all the major players will embrace Matter with their own, *custom extensions* to make sure that functionality is *severely crippled* if you have the audacity to try and use a competitor's brand with their's.

Does not matter unless matter starts to care about video and audio streams.

When will Matter actually be available for us home users?

The matter certification fees and yearly licensing fees are going to have a negative impact on the whole ecosystem. Where there is income -- there will be another group trying to take over that income stream... so, be prepared for another standard in the future.

Bought some cheap bulbs some time ago and as soon as China had a Black-out I couldn’t control them anymore

Missed title opportunity: "Does it 'Matter' for your smart home?"

+ 1 for doubting advanced features will be available via other eco systems. If that is the case, I have ZERO interest in matter.

I would love it if i could just buy any IoT device and it would just work with any platform not be locked down crap

So matter is nothing for me bacause i only use zigbee :) don't like having "smart home devices" on my wifi

So it doesn't matter?

It does not "matter" to me....I have used HA for years...I don't plan to make a change...matter, no matter, I don't really care... keep going HA...🙃

Missed opportunity to title this "Your Smart Home, Does it even Matter?"

The next big thing will be in artificial intelligence hits your Smart home and it automatically adjusts to your habits - prepares heating and cooling depending on weathers situation and sunlight and controls huge energy consuming devices depending on your Solar production :))

I’m not on board until Aibo my robot dog is supported

If everything happens as planned, Matter's failsafe will be killer. In the future, I'll automate the key functions with Homekit and the more playful stuff in Home Assistant. With two HomePod mini, I have a failsafe without having to worry about a backup. There even I can fail and my wife is able to replace something.

A lot of distracting hand motions.

You could say it doesn't really matter..

First comment ❤

So are you saying matter doesn't matter? I'll see myself out.

Why we paying for yt premium when channels put in adverts

Doesn't really Matter. What's the Matter? Eheheheheh.

Very silly name 😄

Hah, all your shitty wifi connected devices can spy on you and provide security flaws to your home network *together*