Four years after its splashy launch in Amsterdam, Matter — the smart home interoperability standard backed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung — still hasn’t delivered on its core promise. But the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) thinks version 1.6 might finally change that.
The biggest new feature, Joint Fabric, would let you create a single smart home network controlled by any Matter platform simultaneously. In other words, it’s the seamless multi-platform experience everyone expected from day one.
There’s a catch. Apple, Google, and Amazon are barely running Matter 1.3 — a spec that came out two years ago. Samsung has committed to adopting new specs within six months but still hasn’t added Matter support to its appliances.
“Matter long-term won’t be successful until everybody can use it at parity,” said CSA CEO Tobin Richardson at the Unify conference in Austin last week. “That’s the goal. And all the companies know that.”
The mood at the conference was cautiously optimistic. Attendees acknowledged Matter hasn’t lived up to the hype, but real progress is being made. The gap between the spec and what platforms actually implement remains the biggest roadblock.
“It would be great if, within a year of new features being published in the spec, it was broadly supported by the ecosystems,” said George Yianni of Philips Hue.
Matter currently supports most major home device types — cameras, lights, thermostats, locks, robot vacuums, appliances, EV chargers, and more. Whether Joint Fabric actually gets adopted by the big platforms will determine if Matter finally becomes the universal standard it was meant to be.
