by Prepare to be able to operate your smart refrigerator, air conditioner, dishwasher, and robotic vacuum from your preferred smart home app thanks to the upcoming release of the Matter 1.2 standard on smart devices and appliances.
Although Matter was the first to employ proprietary standards, smart home devices were great for managing your lights, checking who’s at the door, and even vacuuming your floor with no effort. To run your devices, you had to search for ones that worked with an Apple or Google Home app or use the proprietary, frequently ill-designed apps from the manufacturer.
A smartphone powers a smart home.
Getty Images / Yagi Studio
All of that is now different, though, as Matter 1.2 pushes even more interoperability features into the standard. Nine new devices have been added to the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) standard by a consortium of tech companies and manufacturers, including LG, Apple, Google, Oppo, and others. This means that we will all be able to control our smart devices from the app or system of our choice, for example, your fridge from your iPhone or your robot vacuum from your Samsung Galaxy.
Refrigerators, air conditioners for rooms, dishwashers, washing machines, robotic vacuums, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, air quality sensors, air purifiers, and fans are now considered standard equipment. More advanced control options are supported for each kind of equipment, such as fan characteristics like airflow direction and oscillation modes and messages about the status of laundry.
But Matter 1.2 isn’t just about new hardware; it also brings with it enhancements for door locks, how devices show up in your Home app, tags to make describing your smart things across devices easier, and a new method for creating new device types as they become available (kind of a future-proofing of the standard).
Additionally, there are a few enhancements to the development tools.
With a biannual release schedule, the CSA intends to keep improving Matter as new products become available and manufacturers produce and add additional devices to the standard.
