If you’re not familiar with why Matter matters for smart homes, we have a primer for you below, but to put it as briefly as possible: simplicity. It’s a universal protocol that will allow accessories to work on any major smart home platform, eventually putting an end (in many cases at least) to the question of whether something is compatible with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit, or Samsung SmartThings.
Since it was announced, there have been doubts about how widely Matter will be adopted, and whether it’ll roll out smoothly. Or at all. There have already been a couple of delays — it was originally supposed to go live in 2020, and then in mid-2022. The good news is that based on recent developments, it is likely to meet its current fall 2022 target and become de facto in the smart home industry.
