Taking Matter(s) into your own hands

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at least on paper, all the things I had experienced with my journey into the smart home,” Maupin explained. “At Silicon Labs we realised that it’s more than just compliance to the specification; how does it really work for the user?” Over a three-month period, Maupin tested the three different ecosystems that can be set up using Matter; Google, Apple, and Amazon. One problem he was looking to solve was setting up a single ecosystem, with multiple devices on it. “Overall, that was a good experience,” he noted. “I was most impressed with the commissioning. A lot of the devices in my home were Zigbee or Z-Wave.” Problems that arose during testing included a difficulty with consistency in ecosystems. “For example, I was testing [the] Google [ecosystem]. I used an iPhone and an Android device to commission devices on the network. This brought in questions. As I was going through, I had to scan a QR code and it would prompt me one thing on an iPhone, skip that, and go to a different prompt on an Android device. I wanted to see the same experience through the ecosystem, regardless of the device that I was using.” Another challenge was device support, in terms of what Matter-enabled devices could and couldn’t work on an ecosystem. Providing one example, Maupin said: “The biggest one I saw at the time was the switch. With Apple, the switch worked … with Google, it commissioned the device, but there was no support for it. With Amazon I got an error message saying this device wasn’t supported yet.”

or platforms access each device. In an ideal scenario, a user would follow these steps and then be able to switch between devices with ease, as well as enable cohabitants to do the same. However, the end user experience of setting up Matter-enabled devices can be very different from what is advertised. Separate from this article, Maupin spoke to me on an episode of IoT Unplugged in the wake of a three-month long experiment he conducted, in order to really understand what the experience was like. Companies are wont to discuss their products and solutions in a positive light, but what is it really like buying a device and having to set it up? That was what Maupin set out to find out. Maupin had a unique perspective as both a product marketer at Silicon Labs and a consumer like any of us, meaning he may have had the kind of insight into why devices didn’t work, or why there was difficulty in setting up fabrics.

“One of the reasons I was really interested in Matter was that it was addressing,

The architecture of Matter. Source: GitHub