Whenever a new form of technology debuts, there’s a usually period of intense competition for dominance among rival players. Eventually, the rivals find common ground and some kind of standard emerges.
After years of meandering, it looks like a standard is finally emerging in the smart-home platform market. My hunch is that the timing is right – everyone is tired of trying to decide which platform is best. I believe sincerely that most tech-savvy consumers would just as soon not have to worry about compatibility issues. When it comes to smart-home tech, the vast majority of people would rather skip the technical details and just begin using their smart devices. So the news that a common standard is on the horizon is certainly good news.
“Some of tech’s biggest players – Apple, Alphabet’s Google, Amazon and Samsung Electronics – have established smart-home platforms, so your iPhone can turn off the lights or Alexa can change the thermostat without too much extra setup. But that still means shoppers must check if new products work with the tech they already have at home,” writes Shara Tibken of The Wall Street Journal. “Compatibility issues and setup complexity have made people slow to go all-in with smart-home technology. A new standard, called Matter, aims to change that. When it rolls out this year, Matter will act as a common language spoken by most new—and many older—smart-home products.”
Matter would also reduce the need for smart devices to upload information to the cloud, which should, in theory, reduce the chances of customer data being stolen or misused.
According to Tibken’s report, more than 220 companies will support Matter, which should make it fairly easy to mix and match devices throughout the house. Tibken cites a release from ABI Research stating that “within five years more than half of the world’s key smart home devices will ship supporting Matter. Between 2022 and the end of the decade, more than 5.5 billion Matter compliant smart home devices will ship.”
From my perspective, those kinds of numbers would qualify Matter as a standard. And again, in my opinion, standardizing smart-home technology makes sense, for a variety of good reasons.
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