I have never heard of Matter before, but I was super satisfied with Ikea's zigbee products. Does anyone know why they switched?
Zigbee is great for communication instead of WiFi, but it’s just one part of the equation - it says nothing about the specific commands a device will respond to. You couldn’t pair a Philips remote with an IKEA lightbulb.
Matter attempts to fix it by actually defining the protocol that these devices use. It’s also fully local and open source, which is great. The actual transport layer can be WiFi, but it can also be Thread, which is a newer standard based off Zigbee, and AFAIK some Zigbee controllers can be reprogrammed to support it.
They don’t specify what transport layer they are using here, but considering the kind of devices they are showing (battery-powered remotes) it’s almost definitely Thread.
Might give it a year or three and if they continue on that path I might have to reasses my "No smart devices in the house" "rule".
[1] https://csa-iot.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/22-27349-001_...
Even iPhones have been able to talk to thread devices directly for a while now, so it's a fairly transparent process.
* The old Ikea Zigbee products will remain Zigbee. They will still require a Zigbee coordinator.
* The new products will be Matter-over-Thread. They require a Thread coordinator (or whatever the Thread equivalent is called).
* The existing Ikea hub has had a firmware upgrade that allows it to be simultaneously a Zigbee and Thread coordinator.
* The Ikea hub adds a Matter compatibility layer to the devices that don't natively support Matter.
Backwards compatibility is huge.
But I have heard that old devices will be backwards compatible.
Thread Border Router (for info).
Ikea recently did an update to enable the hub to be a Matter controller itself (over thread or Wifi). This means you can add matter devices to the Ikea hub directly and use the Ikea Home Smart app the control them instead of Apple Home or etc. You can add non-Ikea matter devices as well as Ikea matter devices (when they are released).
And I'd vastly prefer it that Google (and Apple, and Amazon, and Home Assistant, and IKEA, and Philips, and...) all agree on the same protocol than each vendor making up its own thing.
Matter is a communication protocol adopted by a lot of manufacturers but I think practically for the buyer the real benefit is that you no longer need a bucket of hubs for each of the device ecosystems one might use. It's more future proof so it makes sense IKEA would add support for it in their hardware including existing hubs I believe.
Matter simplifies this. It defines the API layer. You can use Thread without Matter, at which point you basically have Zigbee + IPv6, but the power comes with Matter since now every device is speaking the same language and can actually understand each other.
Yes you can, I did that with Ikea, Philips and Innr brands. No hub, not even Z2M involved. Yes, as you say they do need to agree on a "protocol" and AFAIK they are all following Philips lead on that, but they can totally work in a P2P fashion without any hub. They negotiate their own key, you just need to pair them with a very close distance (less than 5cm approx).
Technically Zigbee _also_ defines an API layer -- the Zigbee Cluster Library, or ZCL -- but that's more like an opt-in standard you _could_ implement, rather than any hard requirement. And no surprise, the Matter Cluster Library Specification, being authored by the same CSA that made ZCL, is eerily similar to ZCL...
But as I understand it, you're right that Matter is essentially "hey everyone, let's _actually_ standardize around a common application layer". It isn't technologically revolutionary (the building blocks have been around for more than a decade), but it's a better packaging of it all.
Source: My employer has been involved with Zigbee and other low-power network technologies for a long time.
That works, I am doing the same. But the average consumers don't want to be bothered to run HA, they want things to work out of the box with minimal fuss setting up or operating. This usually meant having the Philips hub, the IKEA hub, the Samsung hub, etc.
> That's enough a proof that the issue was not in the protocol
For sure not in the Zigbee protocol, which is standard. The differences are in the logical communication protocol, at application level. Each manufacturer wanted to fully control their product, with no alignment with other manufacturers, which made devices and hubs mostly incompatible outside of each ecosystem. This is what Matter is looking to fix. One controller coordinating over a standard protocol a bunch of IPv6 devices connected via WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread.
And best part, Matter certification means the devices have to be able to operate locally. No more "cloud polling" [0] type integrations even for basic functions.
[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...
Even if you're all in Ikea's ecosystem it will still mean whatever new devices you add from now on are a separate mesh network and can't use the existing zigbee products as repeaters. If the next thing you want to add is at the far end of your house from the hub, it won't have reception there with Matter until you put other new devices in between.
It can run over Wifi or Thread which provides the physical interface and networking support.
In contrast Zigbee defines both the application layer and the networking.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658056
edit: Feel free to down but the evidence is in the products.
Zigbee will work with any other Zigbee device if it is properly implemented. not so with Thread.
>Apple: Keeps Thread credentials locked to HomeKit's border routers.
>Google: Shares some credentials, but only within Google Account environment.
>Amazon: TBD, but their Matter implementation is mostly cloud-tied.
>Samsung: Hybrid approach; still best when used inside SmartThings, their 1.4 update seems to support for joining existing Thread networks. Still have to test it.
>So, even though Thread theoretically allows full interoperability, no vendor wants to be reduced to a dumb router in someone else’s ecosystem.
>there is no easy way to bridge Apple Thread to Home Assistant or Google Thread, even though it is theoretically supposed to be possible from a protocol standpoint.
>If you have such solutions, let me know, because I would take full advantage of it, and will regale your contributions in multiple home automation threads.