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Matter. There's a significant shift in progress to Matter from smart home device manufacturers. https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/smart-home/matter-s

Matter. There's a significant shift in progress to Matter from smart home device manufacturers. https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/smart-home/matter-smart-home-standard-faq-a9475777045/ https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/smart-home/matte...

efitz 3y ago
There are standards, but every major smart home tech company wants to be the controller, not a slave. Generally you find that, for each brand of device, you have an in-home controller that controls that brand of device over a proprietary protocol, and a proprietary cloud that the controller talks to for app control. Most clouds allow integration with Alexa and Google assistant for voice control, and many clouds will also allow you to control devices of other brands that might have integrated with them. ZWave and Zigbee devices are currently the most vendor neutral but you have to really love smart home to stand up HomeAssistant or whatever and maintain it. And zwave in particular has lots of small but annoying compatibility issues and is difficult to troubleshoot and to keep a complex setup running. I thought threads/matter was going to be great but it looks like latter just took a whole pile of standards and mashed them together and rebranded them. I dunno for sure; I tried to install the matter SDK on a raspberry pi and it was north of a gig download and difficult to figure out.
- thedougd 3y ago
  It still needs to play out but Matter is a multi-master architecture. It is not tied to a single controller. I tried my first switch this week and in one pass it was setup with Google Home and HomeKit. Home Assistant is my next test but I’ve been on vacation.
- samtho 3y ago
  > There are standards, but every major smart home tech company wants to be the controller, not a slave. This is really the crux of the issue. First, from a business perspective, it makes sense: why sell a one-time hardware device when you can charge rent for its continued usage? From a consumer perspective, how can you justify buying a device that can’t operate without an ecosystem you have no knowledge about? This is why we need free and open standards of interoperability. It would benefit hardware businesses that now feel compelled to create an ecosystem when they’re only good at making hardware and consumers can buy devices and only need to check if it works with some standard like we do with WiFi now when selecting personal wireless devices. Maybe a bad example, considering the backwards compatibility of WiFi and the fact that there is only one practical set of wireless network connectivity transports.

efitz 3y ago

There are standards, but every major smart home tech company wants to be the controller, not a slave. Generally you find that, for each brand of device, you have an in-home controller that controls that brand of device over a proprietary protocol, and a proprietary cloud that the controller talks to for app control. Most clouds allow integration with Alexa and Google assistant for voice control, and many clouds will also allow you to control devices of other brands that might have integrated with them. ZWave and Zigbee devices are currently the most vendor neutral but you have to really love smart home to stand up HomeAssistant or whatever and maintain it. And zwave in particular has lots of small but annoying compatibility issues and is difficult to troubleshoot and to keep a complex setup running. I thought threads/matter was going to be great but it looks like latter just took a whole pile of standards and mashed them together and rebranded them. I dunno for sure; I tried to install the matter SDK on a raspberry pi and it was north of a gig download and difficult to figure out.

thedougd 3y ago
It still needs to play out but Matter is a multi-master architecture. It is not tied to a single controller. I tried my first switch this week and in one pass it was setup with Google Home and HomeKit. Home Assistant is my next test but I’ve been on vacation.
samtho 3y ago
> There are standards, but every major smart home tech company wants to be the controller, not a slave. This is really the crux of the issue. First, from a business perspective, it makes sense: why sell a one-time hardware device when you can charge rent for its continued usage? From a consumer perspective, how can you justify buying a device that can’t operate without an ecosystem you have no knowledge about? This is why we need free and open standards of interoperability. It would benefit hardware businesses that now feel compelled to create an ecosystem when they’re only good at making hardware and consumers can buy devices and only need to check if it works with some standard like we do with WiFi now when selecting personal wireless devices. Maybe a bad example, considering the backwards compatibility of WiFi and the fact that there is only one practical set of wireless network connectivity transports.