To succeed, consumers need to be able to rely on standards conformance.
Certification is an obvious way and that costs money.
Is there a way without certification that results in high conformance that consumers can rely on?
Certification is an obvious way and that costs money.
Is there a way without certification that results in high conformance that consumers can rely on?
I understand the certification if a manufacturer wants to sell a product commercially as 'Matter Certified'. For hobbyists or smaller players, pulling the reference implementation, loading it onto a cheap MCU, and calling it 'Works with Matter' would suffice.
As it stands, the latter isn't an option, because of the codesigning they've shoehorned into the spec. And for all the noise made about security, once connected to the hub the manufacturer can run whatever they like on it and send data back to their servers with very little visibility to the user.
Thread is arguably the interesting part for low power devices, and doesn't force certification. Matter is little more than a protocol spec, at the tradeoff of locked down devices and annual fees. For Matter over WiFi, I can't see any point whatsoever in using it. And for the costs of Doing Matter/Thread certification most smaller hardware startups will balk at the hundreds of thousands required to do so, and stick with WiFi/BT/Zigbee/Thread + roll their own protocol/app.
The state-of-the-art solution is to put a bunch of people on planes and burn a bunch of jet fuel to attend a "test fest". You can't issue interoperability until you do this. This costs money that needs to be paid by someone.
A proper reference implementation should first and foremost come with an extensive battery of regression tests, something many a vaunted "standard" utterly fails to provide, being instead tomes upon tomes of impossible to decipher specifications, written - of all things - in human language.
Such a battery of regression tests, if properly design ought to take care of your "variations" in fairly short order.
I had no idea that Matter/Thread mandates secure boot. Presumably that's secure boot without end user freedom to load their own keys. That's no good.
This is why all the (commercial!) high-end home automation uses KNX, because installers can mix and match products and know they won’t get cornered even if a single manufacturer goes out of business.
(And if you want a cheaper system that can be operated with fully-free tools, you’re already covered, that’s ZigBee! But even KNX is “open” once you buy the license for ETS - the config tool - and then you can go to town on your system and reconfigure it at will.)
Sibling commenters have already answered this in the affirmative but a better question is: what examples can you give supporting your thesis that certification drives high conformance?
I'm likely in a bubble but most certification systems I've seen exist in highly "competitive" landscapes (read: competing standards) & exist purely to support an ecosystem of institutions relying solely on certification to make money & providing no other value back to the system (e.g. in the form of standards advocacy, conformance testing or even standards maintenance). To the point I've come to anecdotally equate "certification" with wild-west/scammy corporate practices.
So as far as I've seen certification often has the opposite effect that you propose. At least in the IT & software space.
Open source a reference implementation and a conformance test suite. Open, transparent, and low cost. Also, don't lock out devices that aren't blessed.