Matter 1.4 tries to set the smart home standard back on track

It’s been two long years since the launch of Matter — the one smart home standard designed to rule them all — and there’s been a fair amount of disappointment around a sometimes buggy rollout, slow adoption by companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google, and frustrating setup experiences.

However, the launch of the Matter 1.4 specification this week shows some signs that the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA, the organization behind Matter) is using more sticks and fewer carrots to get the smart home industry coalition to cooperate.  

The new spec introduces “enhanced multi-admin,” an improvement on multi-admin — the much-touted interoperability feature that means your Matter smart light can work in multiple ecosystems simultaneously. It brings a solution for making Thread border routers from different companies play nicely together and introduces a potentially easier way to add Matter infrastructure to homes through Wi-Fi routers and access points.

Arguably, these should have all been in place when Matter launched. But now, two years later, the CSA is finally implementing the fixes that could help move the standard forward. 

Matter 1.4 also brings some big updates to energy management support, including adding heat pumps, home batteries, and solar panels as Matter device types.

Disappointingly, security cameras didn’t make it in this time. The CSA’s CTO, Chris LaPré, tells The Verge that while support for cameras is still part of the plan, there’s no timeline for a release. However, he points out that Matter 1.4 now covers almost every other device category in the home, which should provide a solid foundation to move the standard forward.

However, this week’s release is just the spec. Now that it’s out, device makers and platforms can start integrating the features into their products and ecosystems. Based on the slow rollout of support for devices and features in previous versions of Matter across both manufacturers and the major platforms, it could be a while until we see any impact from Matter 1.4. Additionally, not every device or ecosystem that works with Matter is required to adopt every part of the Matter spec, so all of these features may not come to every ecosystem.

The Verge reached out to Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung to ask if and when they planned to adopt any of the new features and device types in 1.4. As of publication, we had heard back from Amazon and Google. Both companies say they plan to adopt Matter 1.4 but didn’t provide a specific timeline.

“The Matter 1.4 update will start rolling out to supported Echo and Eero devices early next year,” says Amazon spokesperson Connor Rice. “Over time, we’ll continue to add support for new features and Matter device types as device makers release new products.” Google Home’s Jeannie Zhang said the company is actively working to implement the enhanced multi-admin feature and plans to bring support for new device types in the future.

Here’s a look at the new features in Matter 1.4 that could be coming to your preferred Matter smart home platform someday, maybe soon.

Matter will make everyone play together nicely this time, promise

One of Matter’s main promises is interoperability between platforms — if your smart plug is Matter-compatible, it will work with Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, et al. But multi-admin, as this is called, stumbled out of the gate. Not only were there frequent setup frustrations for users when trying to pair a device from one ecosystem to another but also each ecosystem has a different flow and naming convention for the process, making it hard to figure out. It’s almost like they didn’t want you to use it.

Now, “enhanced multi-admin” aims to fix this by automatically adding a Matter device you pair to your main platform to any other smart home platform you’ve authorized. Daniel Moneta, the CSA's marketing chair, explains that this is enabled by something called Fabric Sync, which allows you to authorize different Fabrics (the name for an ecosystem in Matter) to talk to each other.

For example, you can allow your Amazon Alexa Fabric to talk to your Apple Home Fabric and share data about devices. “In this way, if a new device shows up on Fabric A, it can be automatically added to Fabric B,” says Moneta. However, it’s unclear whether the correct name and location of the new device will automatically disperse to the other platforms or if you’ll still have to enter those manually. That will be up to the platforms to implement, says Moneta.

“It’s effectively just multi-admin, but all of the leg work that the users have to go through today — joining devices one at a time and generating the secondary code — all of that now happens automatically,” he says. “This is how a lot of users expected this to work in the first place — but the challenge was security, authorization, and consent, which makes those things more complicated. [Fabric Sync] addresses those concerns. It feels more seamless but is still as secure.” Importantly, he points out, the user is still authorizing a device onto their network and can turn off the connection anytime. 

Enhanced multi-admin should make it possible, for example, to set up that new smart light just once using your iPhone and control it with Apple Home while also having it show up on your roommate’s Android phone, where they can control it in Google Home.

For more advanced smart homes, enhanced multi-admin should make it easier to use devices offered by ecosystems that aren’t your main platform to control your smart home. For example, Apple Home doesn’t have a smart display option. So, in theory, enhanced multi-admin will make it easier to use an Echo Hub or Google Home smart display as a physical interface in your household for controlling things like lights and locks, while using the Apple Home app and Siri on your iPhone and Apple Watch to control the same devices. Of course, this somewhat depends on the platforms supporting all the same device types in Matter, which they don’t currently.

As with all Matter features, enhanced multi-admin is optional, so ecosystems don’t have to adopt it. However, Moneta says all the big players have been actively involved in developing this solution, and he expects to see them implement it over the next year.

Wi-Fi routers get a Matter upgrade

With 1.4, we’re finally seeing home routers, modems, access points, and set-top boxes — known collectively as HRAP — arrive in Matter. Despite being on the list of compatible devices since day one, it’s only now that routers can be Matter-certified. According to the CSA, “Matter-certified HRAP devices provide the foundational infrastructure of smart homes by combining both a Wi-Fi access point and a Thread Border Router.” 

The hope here is that if these common devices come with Matter baked in — or easily added via an OTA upgrade or dongle — it will speed up the adoption of Matter devices. A Matter-certified HRAP device will be both a Wi-Fi access point and a Thread border router, along with “specific Thread and Wi-Fi capabilities … to improve the functionality and user experience of Matter devices on home networks,” says Moneta. 

These “capabilities” include Matter’s new solution for Thread network credential sharing, which lets the router securely store and share the credentials. This is one way to solve the problem of users unintentionally creating multiple Thread networks in their home if they get another device that is also a border router, such as an Apple HomePod or Google Nest Hub.

The Thread Group, which manages the protocol, is trying to solve this problem with its own fix, which it rolled out earlier this year. Plus, you can share Thread network credentials via your smartphone using APIs on Android and iOS. All of these solutions achieve the same end result, says Moneta. 

A Matter-certified router should be able to act as a central hub for Matter, ensuring that any Matter device you have, whether it works over Thread or Wi-Fi, can join your home network securely, easily, and without you needing to buy additional hardware. “This solves the problem of having to think about infrastructure,” says Moneta. “Instead, your next ISP router should have everything you need for Matter.”  

What a Matter-certified router doesn’t need to be is a Matter controller — a device that links your Matter smart home devices to your chosen Matter platform, such as Apple Home or Amazon Alexa. Instead, the router can be platform agnostic, meaning that your router from your internet service provider or your next cable set-top box could provide the Wi-Fi and Thread infrastructure for your smart home, and you would just need to add a Matter controller from whichever ecosystem you want to use.

This also opens up the opportunity for ISPs and telecom providers, such as Comcast / Xfinity, Verizon, AT&T, etc., to create their own Matter-enabled smart home platforms. They’ve tried and largely failed to do this in the past, but Matter could make it easier to implement. 

Currently, Amazon’s and Google’s mesh Wi-Fi solutions — Eero and Nest Wifi — are Matter controllers for their respective ecosystems, but they aren’t Matter-certified routers. Google’s Zhang says they plan to support Matter 1.4 on the Nest Wi-Fi Pro.

Energy management moves front and center

Matter 1.4 expands the standard’s energy management capabilities to include more control and device types, including heat pumps, electric water heaters, battery energy storage systems, and solar power devices such as inverters, panels, and hybrid solar / battery systems. New functionality for these device types (see full details on the CSA’s website) also provides tools for companies and ecosystems to build energy management solutions on top of Matter. 

“Matter 1.4 is a completion move,” says LaPré. “It’s really the enabling piece for smart control of energy in your home.” Matter 1.3 added energy reporting, allowing devices such as home appliances, EV chargers, and HVAC systems to communicate data on their power usage and consumption. With 1.4, such devices can adjust start times based on how much energy they plan to use, shift usage during peak demand, and toggle between device-specific, local, or grid-wide energy. With 1.5, LaPré says they will add the final piece, enabling energy pricing information to be shared with devices.  

Energy management is one of the more compelling use cases for the smart home and one that could encourage wider adoption. While today, some solutions help you balance your home’s electricity loads to use more energy when it’s cheaper or cleaner and work with demand response programs, many of these require proprietary apps, specific equipment, or a lot of legwork by a company to set up partnerships and integrate and manage many APIs.

In theory, Matter should make the process of building an energy management app much easier. “[A company] can do it once and it will apply everywhere,” says Steve Cunningham, CEO of Green Energy Options and head of the CSA’s energy management working group. Instead of making all of these individual partnerships, a company should just need to add Matter to their product to provide the benefits of energy management to a user. “If it has Wi-Fi in it today, by and large, it will have enough capacity to be upgraded to communicate to Matter over Wi-Fi,” says Cunningham. 

Whether all this will actually happen, though, remains to be seen. Initially, we were promised backward compatibility for many Matter products, few of which materialized. Additionally, the Home Connectivity Alliance, an industry coalition of large appliance manufacturers, is simultaneously developing a similar cross-platform solution.

However, LaPré believes that, in this case, we’ll see fairly rapid adoption from manufacturers in this space. “This is expensive infrastructure. While you might buy a new smart plug to support Matter, homeowners aren’t going to change out their $9,000 solar panels on their roof,” says LaPré. “Demand for an open standard like Matter that can connect existing infrastructure is coming from both sides, consumers and manufacturers.”