Matter is now racing ahead, but the platforms are holding it back

The latest Matter spec brings a number of improvements to the smart home standard founded by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung. Released this week by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, Matter 1.3 brings support for more appliances, including ovens and cooktops, adds energy and water management, and introduces new features for Matter’s universal casting protocol that could be a competitor to AirPlay and Google Cast. 

This is all great progress, but as none of the major platforms have added support for Matter 1.2 yet, who knows when they’ll get around to supporting 1.3? But I digress. First, let’s dig into what’s new.

The 1.3 update adds microwave ovens, ovens, electric cooktops, extractor hoods, and electric dryers, which join washing machines and a slew of appliances added to Matter 1.2 last year. The spec also brings new energy and water management features that make EV chargers, water leak sensors, freeze detectors, rain sensors, and water valves compatible with the standard (see sidebar).

With the addition of these new device types, Matter now supports most of your home's major appliances, along with gadgets like smart locks, lights, shades, thermostats, and a variety of other smart home sensors. The CSA’s Chris LaPré tells The Verge that heat pumps and water heaters are coming in the next release, slated for the fall, and that they are working on solar panel integration.

We’re still waiting for popular devices like cameras and video doorbells to be part of Matter. But overall, the smart home standard has come a long way in fulfilling its promise of providing a way for every smart device to work in your home locally over an interoperable communication protocol, even if the implementation still has some bugs to work out. 

While there are plenty of smart devices in the above categories that may work with one or more smart home platforms today, you often need to use products from one manufacturer or one ecosystem to get the most functionality. For example, Moen’s Flo water valve shutoff device only works with Moen’s water leak sensors. In theory, with Matter, these types of devices will work with any other Matter device, regardless of who made them and in any Matter-supported ecosystem. 

But while Matter now supports more device types and features, there are still two big problems. First, there are hardly any 1.2 devices available to buy, let alone 1.3. Second, none of the major platforms have added support for Matter 1.2 yet. Who knows when they’ll get around to 1.3? What is the point of a smart home industry collaboration when no one can actually use it?

We have reached the chicken-and-egg stage of a new protocol. If the platforms don’t support the new device types, manufacturers are less likely to spend resources supporting them (on top of all the other support they need to add to their products to work with Alexa or Google Home or Apple Home, if they can’t do it through Matter). But if there are no devices, then why should the platforms bother putting time, effort, and resources into supporting the new device types?

We’re in developer conference season, so we may see some movement at Google I/O next week or Apple’s WWDC in June. But even if Apple announced full support of Matter 1.2 and 1.3, we’ll still likely have to wait at least six months for it to arrive, presumably with iOS 18.

Amazon has told me that it’s working on adding support, but it’s doing so slowly, and while Samsung’s SmartThings has been the most proactive of the big four, it still hasn’t said if it will allow Samsung appliances to be part of Matter, which seems like a big slap in the face to the whole idea of an open, interoperable standard.

One thing that might move matters along is support for energy management. With Matter 1.3, any Matter device will be able “to report actual and estimated measurements including instantaneous power, voltage, current, and others, in real-time, as well as its energy consumption or generation over time.”

While individual devices can’t do much with this information, a smart home ecosystem or energy management app can tap into this data and help you manage energy use in your home automatically, which is huge.

Some platforms, including Home Assistant and Samsung SmartThings, already offer robust energy management platforms. With Matter now supporting large home appliances and energy management, the potential for more devices to feed into those platforms will grow. Platforms like Apple Home, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa will have to start playing catch-up if they want to capture the rapidly growing market of homeowners who are turning to the connected home to help reduce their energy use.

Key to the energy management spec is the introduction of support for EV charging. Electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) is a new device type in Matter 1.3, adding the capability to control how you charge your EV, including things like telling the car to charge with at least 80 miles by 7:30AM tomorrow using the cheapest / greenest energy.

Again, there are platforms and apps that can do this, but they’re mostly proprietary or limited to partnerships developed by companies. The idea of being able to manage charging your EV in your Apple Home or Google Home app along with your other connected appliances is a compelling one.

Matter casting gets some big improvements, but it’s still Amazon-only

With Matter 1.3, Matter casting is getting some upgrades, including the ability to send push messages to any screen. This could mean getting a notification on your TV when your laundry is done or an alert on your smart display when the robot vacuum is trapped under the couch.

Matter casting, which allows you to cast content to apps on TVs and displays directly from a supported app on a smartphone, has been built into Matter since day one. But so far, only Amazon has done anything with it, adding support for casting Prime Video content from a smartphone to an Echo Show 15 smart display earlier this year. Chris DeCenzo, principal software development engineer at Amazon Lab126 and Amazon’s lead on Matter casting, tells me the team is currently rolling out Matter casting support to its Fire TV devices.

Other new features coming to Matter casting with 1.3 include the option for apps to have multiple clients connected to them at once and offer a different experience for each one. According to DeCenzo, this could allow developers to enable new experiences, such as multiplayer gaming with smartphones.

This sounds similar to the experience Apple offers today, where you can have several people playing the same Apple Arcade game using iPhones and an Apple TV. But where Apple’s is a closed ecosystem, Matter casting is an open protocol that can work with any phone, tablet, or TV that supports Matter. But again, until more platforms support it, there’s less incentive for developers to put time and resources into creating those new experiences. And Apple and Google already have their own proprietary casting systems.

With 1.3, Matter is making some big moves. Energy management, in particular, brings significant value to the standard. Saving money and managing energy use is a good answer to the question of why I need connected devices in my home and it’s something that’s been hard and/or expensive to do with current smart home offerings. Matter could mean more and cheaper options. But until the companies that started this smart home standard actually step up and properly support it, it’s hard to see why anyone else should.