Matter 1.3 Specification Adds Energy Reporting, Electric Vehicle Charging, Water Management Support and More

[boston04and07]

I'm a laundry enthusiast and a HomeKit fan, but I cannot imagine a single instance where I'd want my phone to update me on the status of a wash load. For the times when I'm not within earshot, I simply come back in 45 min — that's worked for me for more than 50yrs.

I never had a smart washing machine until recently but it’s been awesome. I’d actually rather have that than many other smart home integrations. The washer and dryer in my new house is in a place where you can’t hear the tone it plays when it ends and when you have a lot of laundry lined up, getting the notification that a load is finished (or about to be finished) is fabulous.

 

[Jamie0003]

Well, yes I appreciate that.
Still waiting for matter support from the Nest Learning Thermostat - however... I gave them long enough so got rid of it and replaced it.

Once the camera support comes... Ill give Ring an opportunity to support it and if not... similarly ill just replace them with matter compatible ones from a different manufacturer.

I’m more concerned with the privacy aspect with ring. I’m using Aqara E1’s, I’m absolutely stunned with how cheap they are and how well they work. Obviously no support for matter yet but best hands down

 

[GregoriusM]

I work on a connected product and we are waiting for Matter to "get its sh*t together" - the current implementation is utter trash and wildly unstable.Plus the promise of connective home just doesn't pay, for the cost of implementing these protocols just don't equal the sales to cover the cost.

Then I’m wondering why your company continues to produce the products it does if there is no hope for a connective home?

 

[stocklen]

I’m more concerned with the privacy aspect with ring. I’m using Aqara E1’s, I’m absolutely stunned with how cheap they are and how well they work. Obviously no support for matter yet but best hands down

Im just wanting some choice.

I dont care too much about the privacy stuff frankly as if some evil hollowed-out-volcano dwelling moustache twirling minion has the time and interest to pore through billions of hours of footage gleaned from my and all the the other users' Ring cameras without my consent... well have at it - they wont see anything even vaguely interesting frankly.

But, I DO want to choose to make Apple's home app my single port of call for my smart home. We are slowly getting there and I have had to replace some kit to nudge progress along.

I know there are other cameras - but right now my requirement for HomeKit compatible cameras has very little choice in the market and I actually tried a Logitech circle outdoor cam and it was appalling - constant disconnections with long periods of downtime - utterly useless for security purposes so back it went and Ring is, for the time being, my camera system.

Should Ring not support matter, and theres no reason why they cant - but I can see why they wont, I will not hesitate to replace all their kit with ones that do.

 

[stocklen]

As replied above, it is never going to happen. Get HOOBS and be done with it. I'm not exceptionally tech-savvy, and HOOBS has provided seamless Ring integration for years.

View attachment 2375910

not in a million years thanks.

a) im in the UK and hoobs isnt available here anyway and
b) im just not interested in having to add another box to the setup to get HomeKit working - its native or nothing for me.

 

[Phaseangle]

According to CSA earlier in the year cameras aren’t expected until at least 1.4 but most likely 1.5. To be honest I don’t expect these camera companies to cooperate enough to see it next year. Security has been a big issue and I think it would be late 2026 version 1.7

 

[HQuest]

It’s Signify’s fault. I really like my Hie lights and didn’t go the Matter route. If they force it on me all just change to regular LED’s and change the switch to Lutron.

Good luck with Lutron. The one Lutron lamp and switch are the only devices in my 50+ home devices system I cannot properly control via HomeKit. They will turn on, but I have to walk to the switch to turn it off.

 

[DoesItReallyMatter]

Does it MATTER 😀

No it doesn't really Matter

 

[rickdollar]

When Matter came to Hue I immediately did the update from Homekit and got everything set up again. The first annoyance was that my Motion Detectors became unusable. For some reason they were no longer “Motion Detectors” but instead became “Occupancy Detectors.” This meant my old automation that turned on the light in a hallway when I opened the door stopped working entirely. I had to revert back to the Hue app and set up the motion detector automation there instead.

A minor annoyance, but alright, whatever. I added all my lights, set-up my rooms, set-up my scenes and automations.

Six weeks later, all my lights reset to the default rooms. I lost all my automations, scenes, and had to set-up the whole thing again.

Four weeks on from that, half my lights disappeared from Homekit. Couldn’t re-add them. Bridge was there. Other half of the lights worked. Had to set-up the whole thing again.

Another month and a half later, my Kitchen light vanished from Homekit. Again.

Luckily, you could still revert the Hue Bridge back to connecting through homekit instead of Matter.

Not sure if it’s Apple‘s fault or Signify’s fault, or maybe both, or maybe neither and it’s just the standard that’s ****. But never again, they can stick Matter where the Hue lights don’t shine.

When I "upgraded" to Matter all my Hue objects were a mess. Selecting a scene never turned on the same lights twice. And never the correct lights or color. And lots of other problems. After weeks of trial and error I bought an Amazon Echo. Hue works perfectly now. HomeKit and Matter are sub-beta products. Maybe in a few years I’ll give them another try.

 

[leicaman]

Its a bit surprising we are so far into this and still getting basic features. I'm expecting it will be 2025 or 2026 when we finally get the original promise of all smart home devices working on a platform independent solution.

Actually, you can have that if you want. Home Assistant lets you tie anything together. And anything in Home Assistant can be bridged to HomeKit so you can use your home app. But I'm actually preferring creating my own dashboards for my devices and pretty soon I will only use the Home app to work directly with Apple devices. Even they can give you more automation options in Home Assistant.

it's Matter support is finally really good. In the past month it's really improved. We can how share Matter devices back and forth without having to remove them from HomeKit to get them to show up in Home Assistant.

 

[hardwickj]

Matter: probably the most exciting vaporware ever!

You've got it the wrong way around:

Importance of HomeKit or Matter compatibility again underlined

Smart home company Brilliant has announced that it has run out of money, after failing to raise more capital in...

9to5mac.com

Per the article...

While its smart home controllers and light switches continue to work for now, there’s no guarantee that will remain the case for long given the lack of either HomeKit or Matter compatibility

 

[svish]

Good to know about all the changes.

 

[verniesgarden]

Then I’m wondering why your company continues to produce the products it does if there is no hope for a connective home?

we make a lot of non-connected products, but we still kept Amazon and Google integrations. Just giving my (though pessimistic) view from a manufacturer's point of view.

 

[StuBeck]

Actually, you can have that if you want. Home Assistant lets you tie anything together. And anything in Home Assistant can be bridged to HomeKit so you can use your home app. But I'm actually preferring creating my own dashboards for my devices and pretty soon I will only use the Home app to work directly with Apple devices. Even they can give you more automation options in Home Assistant.

it's Matter support is finally really good. In the past month it's really improved. We can how share Matter devices back and forth without having to remove them from HomeKit to get them to show up in Home Assistant.

Yes...I'm aware of HA, but it isn't as user friendly as I'm hoping for. My comments were specifically about Matter anyway, it was supposed to fix everything two years ago, but after delays its shown to have the same basic issues every other standard has had. Its nice that we're getting some of the basics right at least, its just a lot slower than anyone was told.

 

[MNGR]

we make a lot of non-connected products, but we still kept Amazon and Google integrations. Just giving my (though pessimistic) view from a manufacturer's point of view.

Some of us have no interest in using Google or Amazon in our home.

 

[MNWildFan]

I never had a smart washing machine until recently but it’s been awesome. I’d actually rather have that than many other smart home integrations. The washer and dryer in my new house is in a place where you can’t hear the tone it plays when it ends and when you have a lot of laundry lined up, getting the notification that a load is finished (or about to be finished) is fabulous.

Yup, as someone who also doesn't have one of those super fancy smart washers

Most of the time when I'm doing laundry, unless I'm upstairs in my townhome's loft (where said washer/dryer I have are) I'm downstairs watching TV or whatever which more than easily drowns out any noise from the washer from the floor above

Because of that, sometimes I completely miss when the washer is done with its final spin and the little end of cycle song goes off

This is a time when one of those sound sensors could help. Either that, or if there is a way that we could teach a Homepod how to listen for a specific sound (in my case, the little song my washer plays when it's done), then that could be a game-changer for those of us

 

[verniesgarden]

Some of us have no interest in using Google or Amazon in our home.

I agree, I'm a HomeKit user, but research doesn't back the numbers from a business case. There were a lot of headaches in the first implementation (requiring a hardware chip) and the certification process Apple requires, companies don't want to put the fate of their products into the hands of someone else.

 

[pappl]

EVE announced energy monitoring with their smart plugs (Matter/Thread).
Aqara has released some Matter/Thread devices recently.
Hoping for more devices like fridges (temperature monitoring) and washing machines (time until finished, program,...)

 

[klspahr]

I started with home automation back in the X10 days and controlled it with a Motorola StarTac - a real Pain! Then HomeKit arrived and I jumped onto that platform. It was limited in the early days but IT WORKED GREAT! Quick and reliable.

Now it seems to me to be getting worse with every update. Cameras connect slower and slower. The cameras and some other devices drop off line from time to time. But I can open the manufacturer’s app and connect to them, yet they are not online in HomeKit. My HomePod Minis are screwed up for days after I update them. Lately, if the power winks, I can’t control them through HomeKit till I mess them. When I leave my one house to live at my other house for six months, I unplug all my HomePods when I leave because they will at some point in six months drop offline and sometimes take down the whole HomeKit access. I can’t travel 1200 miles to reset them when they crash. I can’t depend on them working. (I can’t believe that these engineers that design these products don’t think about self healing systems that checks for problems and reset themselves.)

It has come to the point this Apple fanboy is looking at dumping HomeKit entirely. I have a Raspberry Pi coming next week and I’m going to try Home Assistant. After looking into this system, the people involved seem to be committed to providing the kind of system that I think will give me what I want. I can make the interface I want on the equipment I want and not be dependent on someone else’s servers or whims.

Apple needs to spend a little bit of that giant mountain of money they got and JUST FIX THINGS! But no, we’ll get a bunch of new “features” that may or may not work. This is the way, sadly.

 

[frenchcamp49er]

I started with home automation back in the X10 days and controlled it with a Motorola StarTac - a real Pain! Then HomeKit arrived and I jumped onto that platform. It was limited in the early days but IT WORKED GREAT! Quick and reliable.

Now it seems to me to be getting worse with every update. Cameras connect slower and slower. The cameras and some other devices drop off line from time to time. But I can open the manufacturer’s app and connect to them, yet they are not online in HomeKit. My HomePod Minis are screwed up for days after I update them. Lately, if the power winks, I can’t control them through HomeKit till I mess them. When I leave my one house to live at my other house for six months, I unplug all my HomePods when I leave because they will at some point in six months drop offline and sometimes take down the whole HomeKit access. I can’t travel 1200 miles to reset them when they crash. I can’t depend on them working. (I can’t believe that these engineers that design these products don’t think about self healing systems that checks for problems and reset themselves.)

It has come to the point this Apple fanboy is looking at dumping HomeKit entirely. I have a Raspberry Pi coming next week and I’m going to try Home Assistant. After looking into this system, the people involved seem to be committed to providing the kind of system that I think will give me what I want. I can make the interface I want on the equipment I want and not be dependent on someone else’s servers or whims.

Apple needs to spend a little bit of that giant mountain of money they got and JUST FIX THINGS! But no, we’ll get a bunch of new “features” that may or may not work. This is the way, sadly.

At this point I’m feeling the same.

 

[leicaman]

Yes...I'm aware of HA, but it isn't as user friendly as I'm hoping for. My comments were specifically about Matter anyway, it was supposed to fix everything two years ago, but after delays its shown to have the same basic issues every other standard has had. Its nice that we're getting some of the basics right at least, its just a lot slower than anyone was told.

I felt the same way for a long time. But then there were things HomeKit simply doesn't do that I wanted to do, so I dipped my toe into the HA waters and loved it! I do have some programming background, but taking it slow has helped. You can do a lot of things with the visual automation tools without any programming at all. If people do decide to try Home Assistant, do not install it on a Mac or in a Docker on a NAS. Get a Home Assistant Yellow (Raspberry Pi) with at least 4 gigs of RAM and a slot for an NVME SSD. Less than $200 and you have a much more solid automation platform without a lot of trouble. (Watch some Youtube videos before deciding!)

 

[leicaman]

I felt the same way for a long time. But then there were things HomeKit simply doesn't do that I wanted to do, so I dipped my toe into the HA waters and loved it! I do have some programming background, but taking it slow has helped. You can do a lot of things with the visual automation tools without any programming at all. If people do decide to try Home Assistant, do not install it on a Mac or in a Docker on a NAS. Get a Home Assistant Yellow (Raspberry Pi) with at least 4 gigs of RAM and a slot for an NVME SSD. Less than $200 and you have a much more solid automation platform without a lot of trouble. (Watch some Youtube videos before deciding!)

You don't need to dump HomeKit to use Home Assistant. In fact, it's easy as pie to share items between both systems. But if I had to choose, it would be Home Assistant.

 

[StuBeck]

I felt the same way for a long time. But then there were things HomeKit simply doesn't do that I wanted to do, so I dipped my toe into the HA waters and loved it! I do have some programming background, but taking it slow has helped. You can do a lot of things with the visual automation tools without any programming at all. If people do decide to try Home Assistant, do not install it on a Mac or in a Docker on a NAS. Get a Home Assistant Yellow (Raspberry Pi) with at least 4 gigs of RAM and a slot for an NVME SSD. Less than $200 and you have a much more solid automation platform without a lot of trouble. (Watch some Youtube videos before deciding!)

My core issue has always been that the basics with HA are so much more difficult to setup, that whenever I've tried (since 2019) it hasn't gone well. I know it just needs time, but I've been able to do what I need to with a alexa or ikea smart home just well enough to avoid having to learn HA.