Vratislav Holub Along with the new operating systems, Apple also boasted a number of interesting innovations for the smart home, of which the support for the Matter standard received considerable attention. We could already hear about him several times. This is because it is a modern standard of the new generation for managing a smart home, on which several technological giants have collaborated with a single goal. And as it seems, the Cupertino giant also helped out, which frankly surprised many fans of the smart household, and not only from the ranks of apple lovers.
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Pavel Jelic Apple is very well known for doing everything more or less by itself and keeping its distance from other technological giants. This can be seen very well, for example, on operating systems – while Apple tries to stick to its own solutions, other companies cooperate with each other and try to achieve the best results with their joint efforts. That is why many people could be surprised by the fact that Apple has now joined forces with others and literally joined the "fight" for a better smart home.
Standard Matter: The future of the smart home
But let's move on to the essential one - the Matter standard. Specifically, this is a new standard that is supposed to solve a very fundamental problem of today's smart homes, or their inability to work with each other and together. At the same time, the goal of smarthome is to make our everyday life easier, to help with common activities and their subsequent automation so that we literally do not have to worry about anything. But the problem arises when we have to pay more attention to something like that than is healthy.
Redesigned Home app in iOS 16
In this regard, we are literally running into a problem walled gardens – gardens surrounded by high walls – when individual ecosystems are kept separate from the others and there is no possibility to connect them with each other. The whole thing resembles, for example, ordinary iOS and the App Store. You can only install applications and games from the official store on the iPhone, and you simply have no other option. The same is true of smart homes. Once you have your entire home built on Apple's HomeKit, but you want to incorporate a new product that isn't compatible with it, you're simply out of luck.
It is by solving these problems that we waste a lot of time unnecessarily. Therefore, wouldn't it be better to come up with a solution that could connect smart homes together and really fulfill the original idea of the whole concept? It is precisely this role that the Matter standard and a number of technology companies behind it claim. Instead, it currently relies on several of them that don't work with each other. We are talking about Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. They all work, but not as well as we would like. Matter takes a different approach. Whichever gadget you buy, you can conveniently connect it to your smart home and set it up in your favorite app to manage it. More than 200 companies stand behind the standard and specifically build on technologies such as Thread, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Ethernet.
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Apple's role in the Matter standard
We've known for some time now that Apple is involved in the development of the standard. But what surprised everyone was his role. On the occasion of the WWDC 2022 developer conference, Apple announced that Apple's HomeKit served as the complete basis for the Matter standard, which is thus built on Apple's principles. That is why we can expect maximum emphasis on security and privacy from him. As it seems, better times are finally dawning in the smart home world. If everything comes to an end, then we can finally say that the smart home is finally smart.
"Once you have an entire home built on Apple's HomeKit, but you want to incorporate a new product that isn't compatible with it, you're just out of luck."
this is not true, many non-HomeKit devices can be connected via Homebridge, or unofficial firmware can be uploaded to some devices, which adds support for HomeKit
we use a combination of both at home and it works reliably…
I don't want to knock Matter down, official support for anything is of course better 🙂 but I just wanted to say that there are other options
Can you please elaborate more on my email shayari.san(at)icloud(dot)com? I'm very interested in this, but I can't seem to find a "dumb guide"... Thank you.
add Sislík
Hello – I use HOMEKIT at home and some equipment is from VOLTIO…. And here quite often there is a problem - mainly time - to arrange everything so that it works; something pairs right away, something doesn't until today... And Homebridge?!? This one is "easily" adjustable for laymen?!? I saw a webinar on the net for 5.000 - that's a lot of money... I'm personally looking forward to Matter precisely because of the possibility of easily connecting various gadgets to the home network system... (at least I hope... ☺)