Smart-home devices would not talk to each other unless you bought into one vendor's app, hub and voice assistant, and almost every standard came from a company or a rival camp.
The Connectivity Standards Alliance, formerly the Zigbee Alliance, built Matter, previously Project CHIP, as a single application layer on top of IP networks. Crucially, the biggest competitors, Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung, all joined and contributed their own technology.
That made the standard a treaty rather than a contest. A device maker that got Matter certified reached every big ecosystem at once, and the platform owners were committed to supporting it.
One open IP layer all the platforms signed
All the major platforms committed, so one spec connected them all.
It sits on standard IP, so it reuses Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Thread instead of inventing new radios.
It is open source and royalty free, so nothing blocks a manufacturer from shipping it.
When rival platforms each own a slice of a fragmented market, the winning standard is the one they all sign onto: pre-commitment, not technical superiority, makes adoption non-negotiable.
Matter 1.0 shipped in October 2022 with hundreds of sponsoring members and certified devices from Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung. Adoption has been uneven, with complexity and slow rollouts tempering initial hype, but the multi-ecosystem promise it set has remained the industry's direction.
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE
The sources
- Matter Connectivity Standards Alliance · csa-iot.org ·
- What is Matter? How the connectivity standard can change your smart home ZDNet · zdnet.com ·