iOS also missing from Alexa's initial Matter offering
The big Matter launch event took place this week in Amsterdam, but it appears it’s not all plain sailing in terms of a seamless, full-fledged Matter rollout.
During their presentation at the Matter launch keynote, Marja Koopman, Amazon’s Director of Smart Home & Health revealed that both iOS and Thread won’t be part of the initial Alexa and Matter integration, and that it will only support three device types at launch: plugs, switches and light bulbs.
Speaking to The Ambient after the keynote, Chris DeCenzo, Amazon’s Senior Principal Engineer, stated that Amazon doesn’t feel that Thread is in a place yet to play its part in a major ecosystem rollout.
“The whole decision around Thread is there’s more tooling required and there’s more integration between us and the other partners needed for us to make sure that this is a smooth experience for customers,” DeCenzo explained.
Thread, in case you’re not aware, is a major part of the Matter 1.0 rollout. Alongside Wi-Fi, it is set to be one of the major communication protocols of the Matter smart home standard and is on board a number of the early certified Matter devices, such as the new Nanoleaf Essentials lights and the Eve Energy.
Plus, Thread will be enabled in existing smart home devices such as smart speakers and hubs, with some of these device types even able to act as Thread border routers.
Amazon itself has a range of these devices; you’ll find Thread border routers in the likes of the 4th-gen Echo smart speaker and all Wi-Fi 6 Eero mesh routers.
However, despite this, DeCenzo said that there are some issues to iron out before we have Thread networks working seamlessly in the background of our Matter smart homes.
“This version of Thread is brand new,” he explained. “And there are some challenges. There’s a great thing about Thread, which is that if you have more than one border router in your house they can actually work together and add resiliency to your Thread network and help to expand it.
“But they can also compete with each other, if they don’t know about one another or know how to share credentials.”
Amazon announced plans to share the API for Thread credentials earlier this year, but the official Matter launch seems to have come a bit too soon for this to become a reality.
“This is a specific API that we announced for the customer to be able to synchronize their Thread network credentials between their different smart home systems,” DeCenzo explained.
“And you’ve seen other companies make similar announcements, but they’ve all just been making the announcements now and we’re only just starting to integrate with each other.
“If you don’t have that integration done, the customer ends up with four or five different Thread networks in their home. They don’t realize that, and they don’t know how to figure out why things aren’t working, right?
“And so, with Thread, we just see that there’s the infrastructure needed that hasn’t yet been built between the different companies.”
DeCenzo argued that first impressions are crucial for the new platform.
“For us, it’s all about the customer experience, and making sure that when customers are introduced to Matter for the first time, they have a wonderful experience,” he said. “Because if they don’t, then it’s going to it’s going to hurt the reputation of Matter.”
There was plenty of good news on the Matter front from Amazon though at the launch event, too.
The Matter SDK program has been completed and new certification requirements for Works with Alexa (WWA) for Matter devices have gone live.
That means developers will have ample opportunity to get their Matter devices singing and dancing within your Alexa smart home.
Amazon will go live with Matter over Wi-Fi, spanning 17 different Echo devices, plugs, switches and bulbs (from an Android setup) in December.
iOS, Thread and additional device types, as well as more Echo and Eero devices, will all be added early in 2023.
The company states that Alexa will support over 100 million devices, across 30 Echo and Eero devices with Matter, by the time the full rollout is complete.
Amazon also used the launch event to announce a Matter-based partnership with SmartThings, which addresses some of the issues Chris DeCenzo outlined to us, such as sharing Thread network credentials.
Using Matter’s multi-admin feature, you’ll be able to control Matter devices via both Alexa and SmartThings without the need to add devices on each smart home system separately.
My take on all of this… there’s always going to be teething issues with anything new in tech. And Matter is not only new, but it’s also pretty much unprecedented in terms of attempting to get the biggest tech brands in the world all singing from the same hymn sheet.
And, as Amazon suggests, if Thread isn’t quite baked yet, it makes sense to hold back on a full-steam-ahead approach for now.
In all likelihood, we’re not going to be seeing mass adoption of Matter in terms of consumer usage until early next year anyway, so we’d expect Amazon to have a full Matter connectivity (and device) arsenal firing by then.
