Ideal smart Home seamlessly anticipates your needs and responds to commands immediately. You don’t have to open a specific app for each device, nor should you remember the exact combination of voice commands and voice assistants that launched the latest episode of your favorite podcast on the recent speakers. Competing with smart home standards makes your device unnecessary complexity. Just not very… smart.
The tech giants are trying to cross the standard by providing a voice assistant as a control layer on top, but Alexa can’t talk to Google Assistant, Siri or Siri or Control Google or Apple devices and vice versa. (So far, no single ecosystem has created all the best devices.) However, these interoperability problems may be fixed soon. Formerly known as Project Chip (Home connected via IP), the open source interoperability standard, known as “Materials”, arrived in 2022. With some of the biggest tech names like Amazon, Apple and Google, seamless integration may eventually reach.
Updated May 2025: We added specifications for this issue 1.4 and 1.4.1 for enhanced multi-assistance, energy management and easier setup, and updated the standard general progress.
Table of contents
Everything matters?
Materials enable different devices and ecosystems to work well. Device manufacturers must comply with this issue standard to ensure their devices are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant. For those who build smart homes, in theory, substances allow you to buy any device and use a voice assistant or platform that you like to control it. (Yes, you can talk to the same product using different voice assistants.)
For example, you can buy a smart light bulb with material support and set it up with Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant, or Amazon Alexa without having to worry about compatibility. Currently, some devices already support multiple platforms (such as Alexa or Google Assistant), but Matter will extend the platform support and set up new devices faster and easier.
The first protocol runs on Wi-Fi and threaded network layers and uses Bluetooth low energy to set up the device. While it supports a variety of platforms, you have to choose the voice assistant and application you want to use – no central material application or assistant. Since substances are effective on local networks, you can expect your smart home devices to be more sensitive to you and they should continue to work even if your internet drops.
What makes it important?
The Connection Standards Alliance (or CSA, formerly the Zigbee Alliance) maintains the problem standard. What sets it apart is the breadth of its membership (more than 550 tech companies), the willingness to adopt and merge different technologies and the fact that it is an open source project. Interested companies can use the Software Development Kit (SDK) to incorporate their devices into the transaction ecosystem royalty-free. This is much simpler than individually authenticating devices for each smart home platform.
Growing from Zigbee Alliance to material is a solid foundation. Bringing major smart home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home and Samsung Smartthings) to the same table is an achievement. Imagine seamless adoption of material is optimistic, but many smart home brands that have jumped on, including August, Schlage and Yale, are passionate on Smart Locks; Belkin, CYNC, GE Lighting, Sengled, sugnify (Philips Hue) and nanoeaf in smart lighting; and others like Arlo, Comcast, Eve, TP-Link, and LG.
When will it arrive?
Things have been beginning for years. The first release of the chip project will expire at the end of 2020, but is delayed until the second year, renamed and then touted as a summer release. After another delay, the Matters 1.0 specification and certification program is open in 2022. Provides SDK, tools and test cases, and opens eight authorized testing laboratories for product certification.
The first wave of material-powered smart home gadgets went on sale in the fall of 2022, and since then we have seen a steady stream of tricks. The first update of the specification, Matter 1.1, arrived in May 2023, was mainly fixed by bugs. Matter 1.2 announced in October 2023 that support for nine new device types has been added, including refrigerators, robot vacuums and air purifiers, as well as improvements to existing categories.
This issue 1.3 specification was released in May 2024, adding energy management, electric vehicle charging and water management, and support for new equipment, including ovens, stoves and washing machines. It also brings improvements to material casting, so in addition to castings that can be from cell phones to TVs, other smart devices (such as robot vacuums) can send messages to your TV to warn you if they get stuck.
