In particular note the bane of all smart homes: if you have to move the next owner won't have a clue what you did. In the worst case you have to hire an electrician (no DIY allowed since it isn't your house anymore) to rip that out so your house is livable. If you are using matter there is a chance they can start using your system in their own way. The more matter takes off the more likely this is. Also the more likely others will use it - perhaps you next house will have matter installed for you and so you can just automate it where you want to instead of rewiring the house first.
So I'm using ESPHome for everything that could be wall powered and BTHome (with those same nrf52840 chips, you can buy boards for like $2 on Aliexpress) for everything that needs to run on battery.
I think the parent is referring more to manufacturers than end users.
It would suck to have fewer low-cost competitors, especially from China manufacturers.
https://wizzdev.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-mat...
But, yes, Matter/Thread is more expensive than Zigbee by a lot.
You don't need UL for smart home sensors.
You don't need UL if you are just selling directly via your own website. However, if you want to sell the product in stores, most stores are going to require it.
Zigbee's issue was that anyone could make devices and modify the protocol. Tons of devices are vendor-locked to their first-party hub. Philips attempted to do this recently with a firmware update and only backed off due to extremely bad PR.
Z-Wave has the same "problem" as Matter. You have to pay the consortium per product. Part of that what that pays for is testing, and cross-vendor compatibility is mandatory. As a consumer you are guaranteed that a Z-Wave device will work with any hub (and therefore Home Assistant/completely locally). You own Z-Wave devices.
I ran both in my old home, and used Zigbee devices where possible (Z-Wave devices are often more expensive).
I would much rather have it the way of Z-Wave and Matter. It is the lesser of two evils.
In theory that's a win for Matter, but I'm a little concerned about the security and enshitification problems that might cause. I kinda like the idea that I can buy a cheap IoT lock off Temu and as long as my Zigbee gateway is secure there's very little chance of that decision coming back to bite me...
I'm sure someone will chime in and say you can setup a VLAN and restrict all Matter devices from the internet yada yada...
You don't have to do that with Z-Wave or ZigBee. And with ESPHome you know exactly what the device is doing because you have 100% control over it.
I can get some random, vendor I've never heard of, ZigBee sensor, and I know it won't do anything rogue on the internet because it doesn't have any way of getting to the internet.
Also, ZigBee is extremely power efficient compared to WiFi. With ZigBee, I don't mind putting a sensor in the crawlspace or somewhere a pain to get to. It won't need the batteries changed for a year or two anyway.
I know Matter can work over more efficient means than WiFi, but most of the cheaper devices I find are WiFi. A cheap ZigBee device is still ZigBee.
Thread doesn't have accessible IP address. It uses IPv6 and the ULA space which is non-routable.
I much prefer that a $3 ZigBee temperature and humidity sensor definitely doesn't use WiFi rather than having to dig to see if a cheap a Matter sensor uses WiFi.
I also much prefer the prices of ZigBee.
We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is.
(Historically, IP wins in these conundrums anyway. IP has been succession of grand successes for decades.
Resistance is futile. We should work to prepare for the eventually of what is to come.)
The protocols themselves might not but as a warning to people looking for “matter” as an indicator they can have local only control, apparently the matter spec doesn’t require local only setup. I bought Honeywell’s new matter thermostat and in order to get the QR code and keys you need to register it to a matter controller, you first have to download their app and connect the thermostat to their cloud, so that you can get the keys from the app. So the matter capabilities are still useless
What is the lay of the land for typical consumers in this respect? Any products you've worked with or would recommend?
I've recently started with Home Assistant and have been adding devices to my single network. The ISP provided eero modem/router doesn't provide VLAN capability.
In my own little world at home, I just use OpenWRT (on a now-old Raspberry Pi 4), Mikrotik access points, and with some random switches that grok 802.11q wherever they are useful. This has let me do whatever I've imagined wanting so far with VLANs, SSIDs, routing, firewalling, ...
And a person can also use a one-box solution running OpenWRT (the OpenWRT One is such a box) or Mikrotik's RouterOS (like their succinctly-named L009UiGS-2HaxD-IN).
But all of that is drifting pretty far from the concept I'd like to see, which is:
Person walks into Wal-Mart. Person buys a router, and some Matter wifi light bulbs. As a part of setting them up, they're walked through a simple process of making an isolated network for those light bulbs.
And we don't seem to be anywhere near there yet.
(And that may seem like a far-reaching goal to some, but similar things have been accomplished in the past. A router from Wal-Mart used to boot up out of the box and Just Work -- while providing a completely unfettered, unencrypted networked named "linksys" or "NETGEAR" for anyone within earshot to participate in.
Things are longer that way these days. Consumer routers have tended to provide secure-by-default wireless networks for a rather long time now. At least in that one little, important aspect of consumer goods, sanity did eventually prevail.)
I usually take my smart devices with me when I move. It's a pretty expensive thing to leave behind for a new owner that probably won't use it anyways. If someone offered me extra to leave them I might and then I'd also leave a manual.
It’s definitely complicated, but it’s a kind of usb-c of smart home - you only worry about the complex part when building a product. Just wish there was a better device reset/portability story.
Considering you can't even set up Matter devices if you lost the enrollment QR code (and the manual enrollment code is printed on the back of those ceiling downlights), it's a very good idea to take them with you and avoid frustrating the future occupants :)
Seems like Home Assistant will launch a combo Zigbee/Thread dongle with great range in two weeks, might want to wait for that: https://old.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1opak9w/new_...
It depends on your setup how easy it would be, but the Zigbee stick I use for controlling Ikea stuff also has firmware available for using it with Matter. There's a good chance whatever IoT solution you use can be hooked up to Matter.
There's 3~5 variants that require separate radios or at least separate frontends to work probably.
Notably these days are the ZigBee PHY and the FiRa PHY.