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I feel there is some baby being thrown out with the bathwater here, but I'd blame the automation companies that are pushing complexity as a means to vendor lock
by avidiax 2y ago
I feel there is some baby being thrown out with the bathwater here, but I'd blame the automation companies that are pushing complexity as a means to vendor lock-in. The Crestrons and Phillips Hues and Samsung SmartThings of the world refuse to make an app-free cloud-free commodity smart home system.
Matter is unfortunately not that vision. It is still locking you into a cloud-based system, but you can take your devices to a system of your choice.
The system just needs to be simple. You should be able to buy a smart switch from any company. It should power and dim attached dumb and smart bulbs the old fashioned way. Pairing directly connected bulbs should just be turning the switch on and off 5 times quickly. Wireless pairing shouldn't require an app or attestation or other cloud stuff, just sharing a secret one time in-band on some standard protocol over 802.15.4. If you want to have a wireless switch clone a wired one, turn them on and off together 5 times. If you want an all-on, all-off wireless switch, turn all your lights on, and flip the master breaker 5 times along with your new switch. If you want something complicated, get an 802.15.4 bridge/controller. If you want to control with an app, let the bridge controller be accessible via a TailScale-like tunneling VPN or the local WiFi, still no cloud.
This could all be simple and interoperable, but that won't let any company tell their shareholders that their cloud-based smarthome base is growing X% YoY or that their gross margin on smart bulbs is 80%.
- WalterBright 2y agoPeople have been saying that for 30 years now.
- eternityforest 2y agoWe actually had this kind of thing 30 years ago or so with X10 and the like. I always hear it was crappy and unreliable and insecure, but it seems like it's pretty much the kind of experience people want.
- cassianoleal 2y ago> Matter is unfortunately not that vision. It is still locking you into a cloud-based system, but you can take your devices to a system of your choice. I'm not sure what that means. I have quite a few Matter devices. None of them use cloud services. They exist but they're not required in any way.
- avidiax 2y agoWhich fabric are you using? https://handbook.buildwithmatter.com/howitworks/fabric/ https://handbook.buildwithmatter.com/howitworks/fabric/
- cassianoleal 2y agoGood question! I use Home Assistant OS with the Matter Server addon. Are you saying whatever operates the fabric has a cloud dependency? Home Assistant does have Internet access but even if I firewall that off, the devices keep working.
- avidiax 2y agoI wasn't aware that there are open source fabrics. It's not mandatory that it's cloud-based, that's just how the Apple/Google/Samsung etc. fabrics are all implemented. I do think that Matter is designed with a commercial, cloud-based fabric in mind. Normal people don't want to have even a smart home router, let alone run a local fabric.
- cassianoleal 2y agoI’m fairly sure that if I pair them all to HomeKit, they still work without Internet. That’s the case for everything else with HomeKit, I don’t see why it would be different for Matter devices. > Normal people don't want to have even a smart home router, let alone run a local fabric. That’s fair, I guess, but _something_ has to coordinate things. I’m not aware of how Samsung, Google and others do it as I’m only familiar with Home Assistant and HomeKit, but the main difference between those 2 is that with Home Assistant that _something_ is whatever runs HA (I have it on a VM, but a lot of people run it on SBCs or one of the official appliances), and the Apple ecosystem relies on other devices people bought in are likely to already own (iPads, Apple TVs, HomePods, …). In either case, the controller device is there and requires no Internet access to operate. Possibly during commissioning of a new device - I haven’t checked - but that’s it.
- 2y ago