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Comment by cpressland | Hacker News Reader

I’m in the process of migrating from Zigbee (Z2M) to Matter over Thread (Apple HomePods + Matter Server).

My Zigbee network was a mishmash of different vendors all of which had their own failure rates and quirks, Aqara having by far the highest failure rate and complexity.

My new Ikea (Thread) based setup has had absolutely zero issues so far and fingers crossed it doesn’t start suffering as I scale it out. That said, it is noticeably slower than Zigbee, but we’re talking 50ms > 250ms. Which is more than acceptable.

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What's to stop Ikea from pushing an OTA and crippling your whole setup 2 years from now?

You don't need to update your devices, and they don't need to be connected to any cloud. That's the whole point of these local communication protocols, after all.

Sorry to pop your bubble, but the moment you add any IP connectivity it will be eventually used to mandate internet access. The devices you have now might not yet demand it, but you will have to replace them at some point or extend your setup in the future. We've seen this play out so many times now, it's baffling people still think this time will be different.

There's a saying: If you set up a trough, the pigs will come.

For IPv6 networks you're in luck. The hubs are not proxies so the IPv6 enabled IoT device in an IPv6 network can still be blocked at firewall level from accessing the internet. Less that the separation Zigbee provides but better than nothing.

For IPv4 networks you're out of luck. The internal mesh traffic is still IPv6 to the hub and anything crossing into the IPv4 network is done through the hub's IP. No more blocking available unless it's a feature of the hub. I'm not aware of any hub having this kind of FW capability.

Firewall blocking is not the point. The point is, that over time through enshitiffication the new device will require call home to unlock. Even when it does not need internet to work at all. But through this the vendor will get a foothold.

Sure you can block it, but then you have a pricey paperweight.

This is not unique to Thread/Matter, they can pull the rug on ZigBee as well, ofc.

The assumption of enshitification it that is receives updates. What you and a few others aren't understanding is that these don't need updates. These aren't Alexa or Google devices. They just get setup and passively work

Now, will they eventually build devices that don't work like that? Maybe.

The enshitification I mean, applies to the new models. Once the current device dies, you need to replace it.

And in the future, the offline devices might be no longer available, because they stopped being produced. And only new shittier ones are for sale.

A lot of companies have invested a lot into matter and thread. I’d be surprised if companies started requiring a call home to work. It doesn’t make sense to need that, since a thread network is, in a sense, offline by nature. Only the hub has access to the internet and it doesn’t require access to work, so having a device require a call home wouldn’t really make sense.

I get that enshittification is a real thing but I’d be surprised if it affected smart home devices in the way you are describing.

Oh you're talking about a pretend device that this person with replace due to the pretend problem with their current device.

So what's your solution to this problem?

i dont really understand the point. am i never going to buy any tech ever again, because most things tend toward enshitification?

> through enshitiffication the new device will require call home to unlock

I thought Matter certification demands that the device work without cloud connectivity, it's part of the spec. Being able to use any hub and have guaranteed basic functionality without the cloud is the big selling point.

> This is not unique to Thread/Matter, they can pull the rug on ZigBee as well, ofc.

Exactly. Enshittification can't be prevented with technical means, a manufacturer looking to rentseek can always do something shady to force your hand no matter the technology. These are by definition smart and connected devices, there are plenty of avenues for abuse. Philips tried to push an app update that required you to log in to an account to manage your Zigbee Hue hub and devices. They'll try again.

Thread/Matter are on paper mostly good for the consumers but come with some potential drawbacks. No smart home technology eliminates these risks, they only balance different advantages and drawbacks.

> but then you have a pricey paperweight.

The device must work offline. You might lose some features though, usually the ones that are only supported via the proprietary app.

I run 100-device zigbee network with zigbee2mqtt. Philips, Bosch, Sonoff and some others. No internet access.

Zigbee devices are slow and low power, they cannot access internet directly.

Not directly, no; they do it via the hub

Zigbee: You can buy vendor independant bridge / antenna and vendor independant automation server (Home Assistant being the most popular).

I guess a bridge vendor could pull the rug on the antenna ("your Sonoff zigbee antenna is now only compatible with Sonoff zigbee product")(to be clear: they've never done that), but the format is open enough that there's ton of alternative suppliers and open source bridge (the aforementioned zigbee2mqtt).

In any case, I've got a good amount of both Ikea tradfri and Philips Hur bulb and they have never contacted an Ikea or Philips hardware or software of their life.

That they would never see me buying again from them. That I can stop OTA. That matter is interoperable and I can run multiple gateways before cutting them out.

Most IoT stuff I own had a good track record. The only stuff that screwed me over was the logitech harmony smart remote.

But I usually pick the more open ecosystems and vendors. E.g.heating is on shelly.

If we start from GP premises where they were multi-vendor on ZigBee and now (allegedly) are living a much better mono-vendor life with Matter, you cannot play the multi-vendors card. I'm on ZigBee multi-vendor orchestrated by Zigbee2MQTT and while some devices are quirky sometimes (worse offender... IKEA) I'm not planning to move over to Matter any time soon at all.

> That said, it is noticeably slower than Zigbee, but we’re talking 50ms > 250ms. Which is more than acceptable.

I’m taking your “but” to mean “it is acceptable.

I would at least deem it noticeable to wait a quarter second for my light to turn on. May just be my own impatience, but I get an insta-headache whenever I have to wait to find out whether something worked or I have to try again. Every bit of jank is a downgrade in quality of life to me.

Now: May this be due to that specific setup or is the delay somehow inherent to the technology?

In many situations you're already "latent" due to interacting via voice: "Hey Siri, turn on the lights" is ~3-4 seconds to say casually, allow another 0.5-1.0 seconds due to voice processing, network, etc, and the missing 200ms is basically par for the course.

Where it starts to get annoying is "door open" and "motion detected" triggers. Motion detected can be played off as a sloppiness in the sensor cone, but going from "instant" to "laggy video game" when you have a physical trigger can be relatively annoying.

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