First Matter Certification of Smart Devices: Why is Smart Home Technology Relevant now that Smart Home devices are compatible with Matter? A Samsung Electronics Senior Vice President Jaeyeon Jung

The road to smart home nirvana is paved with different standards, like Zigbee, Z-Wave, Samsung SmartThings, Wi-Fi HaLow, and Insteon, to name a few. These protocols and others will continue to exist and operate. Google has merged its Thread and Weave technologies into Matter. The new standard also employs Wi-Fi and Ethernet standards and uses Bluetooth LE for device setup.

If you buy a smart home device that has the Matter logo on it, you should be able to use it with any Matter-compatible device and any platform that will work with it. Towards the end of this year, matter-compatible devices will be available.

The CSA says the last delay was to accommodate more devices and platforms and ensure they all work smoothly with one another before release. More than 130 devices and sensors are working through certification, and you can expect many more soon.

Jaeyeon Jung, Samsung Electronics corporate vice president and head of SmartThings’ mobile experience business, told The Verge in an interview that the company received its Matter certification early on Wednesday, October 12th, a week after Matter launched. Matter, which is part of the alliance, started issuing certifications this week, and according to Mindala-Freeman,Samsung was the first one to get one.

While the upgraded hubs will still support Zigbee and Z-Wave, they won’t be Matter bridges, at least not anytime soon. Jung says they don’t have a plan for that function yet. Existing Z-Wave and ZigBee devices will not be exposed to Matter because SmartThings users will still be able to use those devices.

While v2 hubs aren’t capable of being upgraded to Thread and will support Matter devices over Wi-Fi and ethernet, Jung says they will be able to control any Thread devices using a Thread border router built into another device. The same will be true of the software-based hubs in Samsung smart TVs, monitors, and Family Hub fridges, if you don’t add a dongle.

Jung says Samsung’s smart appliance ecosystem is one of the reasons the company thinks consumers will choose to use SmartThings over another platform now that Matter is making compatibility of devices less of an issue in the smart home. (SmartThings arguably built its brand on being the most open platform of the major players).

Aqara just lifted the veil on its smart home roadmap at the Matter launch event in Amsterdam. It starts with a free software update in December for the Hub M2 to make many of Aqara’s existing Zigbee devices Matter compatible. That will be followed by the release of Aqara’s first two Matter-over-Thread devices in early 2023 and a new multi-protocol hub coming sometime in the future.