Ikea Launches New Smart Home Range with 21 Matter-Compatible Products
Key topics
IKEA has launched a new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products, sparking discussion among HN users about the implications of this move, including concerns about compatibility, pricing, and the future of Zigbee technology.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
13m
Peak period
140
0-12h
Avg / period
20
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Nov 6, 2025 at 8:26 AM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 6, 2025 at 8:39 AM EST
13m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
140 comments in 0-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 12, 2025 at 4:14 PM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Even if you're all in Ikea's ecosystem it will still mean whatever new devices you add from now on are a separate mesh network and can't use the existing zigbee products as repeaters. If the next thing you want to add is at the far end of your house from the hub, it won't have reception there with Matter until you put other new devices in between.
Zigbee is great for communication instead of WiFi, but it’s just one part of the equation - it says nothing about the specific commands a device will respond to. You couldn’t pair a Philips remote with an IKEA lightbulb.
Matter attempts to fix it by actually defining the protocol that these devices use. It’s also fully local and open source, which is great. The actual transport layer can be WiFi, but it can also be Thread, which is a newer standard based off Zigbee, and AFAIK some Zigbee controllers can be reprogrammed to support it.
They don’t specify what transport layer they are using here, but considering the kind of devices they are showing (battery-powered remotes) it’s almost definitely Thread.
Might give it a year or three and if they continue on that path I might have to reasses my "No smart devices in the house" "rule".
[1] https://csa-iot.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/22-27349-001_...
Even iPhones have been able to talk to thread devices directly for a while now, so it's a fairly transparent process.
* The old Ikea Zigbee products will remain Zigbee. They will still require a Zigbee coordinator.
* The new products will be Matter-over-Thread. They require a Thread coordinator (or whatever the Thread equivalent is called).
* The existing Ikea hub has had a firmware upgrade that allows it to be simultaneously a Zigbee and Thread coordinator.
* The Ikea hub adds a Matter compatibility layer to the devices that don't natively support Matter.
Backwards compatibility is huge.
But I have heard that old devices will be backwards compatible.
Ikea recently did an update to enable the hub to be a Matter controller itself (over thread or Wifi). This means you can add matter devices to the Ikea hub directly and use the Ikea Home Smart app the control them instead of Apple Home or etc. You can add non-Ikea matter devices as well as Ikea matter devices (when they are released).
Thread Border Router (for info).
And I'd vastly prefer it that Google (and Apple, and Amazon, and Home Assistant, and IKEA, and Philips, and...) all agree on the same protocol than each vendor making up its own thing.
Matter is a communication protocol adopted by a lot of manufacturers but I think practically for the buyer the real benefit is that you no longer need a bucket of hubs for each of the device ecosystems one might use. It's more future proof so it makes sense IKEA would add support for it in their hardware including existing hubs I believe.
Matter simplifies this. It defines the API layer. You can use Thread without Matter, at which point you basically have Zigbee + IPv6, but the power comes with Matter since now every device is speaking the same language and can actually understand each other.
Yes you can, I did that with Ikea, Philips and Innr brands. No hub, not even Z2M involved. Yes, as you say they do need to agree on a "protocol" and AFAIK they are all following Philips lead on that, but they can totally work in a P2P fashion without any hub. They negotiate their own key, you just need to pair them with a very close distance (less than 5cm approx).
Technically Zigbee _also_ defines an API layer -- the Zigbee Cluster Library, or ZCL -- but that's more like an opt-in standard you _could_ implement, rather than any hard requirement. And no surprise, the Matter Cluster Library Specification, being authored by the same CSA that made ZCL, is eerily similar to ZCL...
But as I understand it, you're right that Matter is essentially "hey everyone, let's _actually_ standardize around a common application layer". It isn't technologically revolutionary (the building blocks have been around for more than a decade), but it's a better packaging of it all.
Source: My employer has been involved with Zigbee and other low-power network technologies for a long time.
That works, I am doing the same. But the average consumers don't want to be bothered to run HA, they want things to work out of the box with minimal fuss setting up or operating. This usually meant having the Philips hub, the IKEA hub, the Samsung hub, etc.
> That's enough a proof that the issue was not in the protocol
For sure not in the Zigbee protocol, which is standard. The differences are in the logical communication protocol, at application level. Each manufacturer wanted to fully control their product, with no alignment with other manufacturers, which made devices and hubs mostly incompatible outside of each ecosystem. This is what Matter is looking to fix. One controller coordinating over a standard protocol a bunch of IPv6 devices connected via WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread.
And best part, Matter certification means the devices have to be able to operate locally. No more "cloud polling" [0] type integrations even for basic functions.
[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658056
edit: Feel free to down but the evidence is in the products.
Zigbee will work with any other Zigbee device if it is properly implemented. not so with Thread.
>Apple: Keeps Thread credentials locked to HomeKit's border routers.
>Google: Shares some credentials, but only within Google Account environment.
>Amazon: TBD, but their Matter implementation is mostly cloud-tied.
>Samsung: Hybrid approach; still best when used inside SmartThings, their 1.4 update seems to support for joining existing Thread networks. Still have to test it.
>So, even though Thread theoretically allows full interoperability, no vendor wants to be reduced to a dumb router in someone else’s ecosystem.
>there is no easy way to bridge Apple Thread to Home Assistant or Google Thread, even though it is theoretically supposed to be possible from a protocol standpoint.
>If you have such solutions, let me know, because I would take full advantage of it, and will regale your contributions in multiple home automation threads.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507971
It can run over Wifi or Thread which provides the physical interface and networking support.
In contrast Zigbee defines both the application layer and the networking.
I do wish the new range would include blinds; the previous generation (FYRTUR) is out of production, and it doesn't seem like there's a replacement yet.
Perils of being early adopter, but kind of soured on the whole smart home concept unless you are wealthy enough to redo all of your home lighting and window treatments every 10 years. Apart from the effort, it creates yet more e-waste. I have 30+ year old manual window shades and lamps and they all still work.
I forked out for SmartWings blinds. You can choose between either Zigbee/Matter or Z-Wave (or neither I think?). The first-party hub is completely optional (that's important to look out for with Zigbee, which can be vendor-locked). They are drastically simpler than the average motorized blinds I've seen around, so I haven't had any of the mechanical failure nightmares. Pretty happy overall; though I haven't had them for 10 years.
I do use them as a kind of alarm clock as I am absolutely horrific with mornings, so manual ones wouldn't really work out for me.
For example, I have more than a dozen Zigbee smart outlet around my home, and the IKEA one is the only one that ever hang and became uncontrollable, yet its also the only one without a physical button to toggle and without power monitoring.
One of IKEA's Zigbee remote controls I have also regularly drops connection and I have to remove its battery to reset it from time to time.
The ones I bought from AliExpress of unknown brands are, unfortunately, much cheaper, have more functionalities, and more reliable.
I replaced the hub with a Home Assistant Green with ZHA, and I haven't had any issues since.
So in my experience each of the devices seem fine over Zigbee, but the hub doesn't seem verify good.
I was also somewhat impressed, and happy, that the Dirigera supported the older (I think discontinued now) Tradfri devices rather than making you replace things.
There's 3~5 variants that require separate radios or at least separate frontends to work probably.
Notably these days are the ZigBee PHY and the FiRa PHY.
In particular note the bane of all smart homes: if you have to move the next owner won't have a clue what you did. In the worst case you have to hire an electrician (no DIY allowed since it isn't your house anymore) to rip that out so your house is livable. If you are using matter there is a chance they can start using your system in their own way. The more matter takes off the more likely this is. Also the more likely others will use it - perhaps you next house will have matter installed for you and so you can just automate it where you want to instead of rewiring the house first.
Seems like Home Assistant will launch a combo Zigbee/Thread dongle with great range in two weeks, might want to wait for that: https://old.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1opak9w/new_...
In theory that's a win for Matter, but I'm a little concerned about the security and enshitification problems that might cause. I kinda like the idea that I can buy a cheap IoT lock off Temu and as long as my Zigbee gateway is secure there's very little chance of that decision coming back to bite me...
I'm sure someone will chime in and say you can setup a VLAN and restrict all Matter devices from the internet yada yada...
You don't have to do that with Z-Wave or ZigBee. And with ESPHome you know exactly what the device is doing because you have 100% control over it.
I can get some random, vendor I've never heard of, ZigBee sensor, and I know it won't do anything rogue on the internet because it doesn't have any way of getting to the internet.
Also, ZigBee is extremely power efficient compared to WiFi. With ZigBee, I don't mind putting a sensor in the crawlspace or somewhere a pain to get to. It won't need the batteries changed for a year or two anyway.
I know Matter can work over more efficient means than WiFi, but most of the cheaper devices I find are WiFi. A cheap ZigBee device is still ZigBee.
Thread doesn't have accessible IP address. It uses IPv6 and the ULA space which is non-routable.
I much prefer that a $3 ZigBee temperature and humidity sensor definitely doesn't use WiFi rather than having to dig to see if a cheap a Matter sensor uses WiFi.
I also much prefer the prices of ZigBee.
We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is.
(Historically, IP wins in these conundrums anyway. IP has been succession of grand successes for decades.
Resistance is futile. We should work to prepare for the eventually of what is to come.)
What is the lay of the land for typical consumers in this respect? Any products you've worked with or would recommend?
I've recently started with Home Assistant and have been adding devices to my single network. The ISP provided eero modem/router doesn't provide VLAN capability.
In my own little world at home, I just use OpenWRT (on a now-old Raspberry Pi 4), Mikrotik access points, and with some random switches that grok 802.11q wherever they are useful. This has let me do whatever I've imagined wanting so far with VLANs, SSIDs, routing, firewalling, ...
And a person can also use a one-box solution running OpenWRT (the OpenWRT One is such a box) or Mikrotik's RouterOS (like their succinctly-named L009UiGS-2HaxD-IN).
But all of that is drifting pretty far from the concept I'd like to see, which is:
Person walks into Wal-Mart. Person buys a router, and some Matter wifi light bulbs. As a part of setting them up, they're walked through a simple process of making an isolated network for those light bulbs.
And we don't seem to be anywhere near there yet.
(And that may seem like a far-reaching goal to some, but similar things have been accomplished in the past. A router from Wal-Mart used to boot up out of the box and Just Work -- while providing a completely unfettered, unencrypted networked named "linksys" or "NETGEAR" for anyone within earshot to participate in.
Things are longer that way these days. Consumer routers have tended to provide secure-by-default wireless networks for a rather long time now. At least in that one little, important aspect of consumer goods, sanity did eventually prevail.)
The protocols themselves might not but as a warning to people looking for “matter” as an indicator they can have local only control, apparently the matter spec doesn’t require local only setup. I bought Honeywell’s new matter thermostat and in order to get the QR code and keys you need to register it to a matter controller, you first have to download their app and connect the thermostat to their cloud, so that you can get the keys from the app. So the matter capabilities are still useless
So I'm using ESPHome for everything that could be wall powered and BTHome (with those same nrf52840 chips, you can buy boards for like $2 on Aliexpress) for everything that needs to run on battery.
I think the parent is referring more to manufacturers than end users.
It would suck to have fewer low-cost competitors, especially from China manufacturers.
You don't need UL for smart home sensors.
You don't need UL if you are just selling directly via your own website. However, if you want to sell the product in stores, most stores are going to require it.
https://wizzdev.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-mat...
But, yes, Matter/Thread is more expensive than Zigbee by a lot.
Zigbee's issue was that anyone could make devices and modify the protocol. Tons of devices are vendor-locked to their first-party hub. Philips attempted to do this recently with a firmware update and only backed off due to extremely bad PR.
Z-Wave has the same "problem" as Matter. You have to pay the consortium per product. Part of that what that pays for is testing, and cross-vendor compatibility is mandatory. As a consumer you are guaranteed that a Z-Wave device will work with any hub (and therefore Home Assistant/completely locally). You own Z-Wave devices.
I ran both in my old home, and used Zigbee devices where possible (Z-Wave devices are often more expensive).
I would much rather have it the way of Z-Wave and Matter. It is the lesser of two evils.
I usually take my smart devices with me when I move. It's a pretty expensive thing to leave behind for a new owner that probably won't use it anyways. If someone offered me extra to leave them I might and then I'd also leave a manual.
Considering you can't even set up Matter devices if you lost the enrollment QR code (and the manual enrollment code is printed on the back of those ceiling downlights), it's a very good idea to take them with you and avoid frustrating the future occupants :)
It’s definitely complicated, but it’s a kind of usb-c of smart home - you only worry about the complex part when building a product. Just wish there was a better device reset/portability story.
It depends on your setup how easy it would be, but the Zigbee stick I use for controlling Ikea stuff also has firmware available for using it with Matter. There's a good chance whatever IoT solution you use can be hooked up to Matter.
I keep hoping that Ikea would come up with something that can go over a switch to manually control it. Seems like it would be very much within Ikea's target market (renters). There are devices like this on Amazon but having used them in the past they are finicky at best.
Otherwise, I used floor lights in the past with WiFi switchable sockets before I switched to ZigBee. The WiFi ones wanted to dial home.
Of course you need Home Assistant set up for this, but if you are interested in these types of things, it will be very useful.
I currently use Home Assistant but want to shift to something more “mass market” as I’m bored of being family tech support.
But you can do it with just Home Assistant and a Thread radio: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/thread#turning-ho...
Personally, I pair my wifi and Thread matter devices to my Apple Home, as each Apple TV behaves as a redundant, ethernet connected gateway. I then do a secondary pairing to Home Assistant and Google Home. Local control and it works very well.
If I just want a smart switch that controls a smart light, can I do that without a hub? Can I use my phone to control that light/switch in a pinch? I'm not averse to spending $100 or whatever, but it's just more _stuff_ that I'd rather not think about.
[0] "Apple now lets you add Matter devices to Apple Home without a hub" https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/18/24246581/ios18-matter-sma...
A pocket supercomputer, such as an iPhone, theoretically works just as well: It's a small computer-widget that sits on a network, right? It just happens to run on batteries and be carried around in your pocket.
It's just software at that point.
At the end of the day: The Matter devices are paired with the controller, similar to how Bluetooth devices are also typically paired with a main brain-box. (Except: A Matter device can be paired with many controllers concurrently, whereas a lot of Bluetooth devices can only be paired with one at a time.)
The network connection doesn't have to be permanent: It can work when controller is present on the network, and it will [perhaps obviously] cease to work when the controller is absent.
So if Apple has software that runs within an iPhone and acts as a Matter controller, then: Sure, no additional hardware is needed to wiggle the state of a Matter light bulb using your iPhone.
(And if that kind of local control is all you ever care about for controlling stuff then... that's good enough.)
(I've done paid work on Matter so I'll avoid giving possibly-tainted opinions on any particular vendor's products.)
How would you use this and ensure privacy and security? Without investing time in becoming an amateur network engineer?
Despite this IKEAs devices have been mostly Zigbee and have worked very well with ZB2MQTT and Home Assistant out of the box. You are not required to buy a hub either that talks to some random server. Not to mention that IKEA had the to make sure the new smart hub the released was compatible with Matter/Thread meaning that customers are not forced to send more E-waste to landfill. The bar is pretty low these days and I feel IKEA exceeds that by a large margin
It seems like something for bored, married people.
You'll still end up being an amateur network engineer though.
1. Open/Close sensors, I would like to put sensors on my shed door and side gates that can tell me if they are open or closed. I will occassionally leave these open, or the kids may leave them open and would prefer they be closed each night. It's impossible for me to tell if they are closed at the moment without stepping outside.
2. Smart plugs. Being able to remotely operate / schedule plugs to shut off or on seems pretty nice. Outdoor lights being one usecase. Kids media area is another.
I started with similar needs and thought it would be frivolous, but now I find it genuinely useful and can’t believe I waited so long.
[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/
I only have experience with the first three (besides Home Assistant) and they work very well (though the SmartThings hub is somewhat limited when it comes to device support, graphing, etc.).
I should also mention that with Homey Bridge the dashboard is in their cloud, though the Zigbee/Z-Wave devices are fully local. Homey Pro is also local. (I think they have a Homey Pro Mini in the US now.)
HA is fiddly but with enough effort you can make anything run the way you want to, and the community is pretty active.
weirdness going on in a regular home you need to accomodate that with any of these 'turnkey' solutions
Homey Pro supports user apps written in HomeyScript (which is JavaScript-based). Similar to Home Assistant, there are many community extensions, including more obscure things. For instance, our not-very-common heat pump is also supported in Homey. A lot of vendors make Homey apps as well.
In a household with more than one person, everyone eventually has to use the home automation system and with Homey (but also SmartThings), I am sure my wife can also manage it when necessary if I'm on the go. Managing Home Assistant + the hardware is going to take a lot more effort to learn.
I like Shelly's doodads. They are easy to work with, you can flash their firmware with an alternative if you want (Tasamota is popular). They have a decent onboard scheduler and the only app you need is a web browser pointed at its IP address. They don't need internet access.
It's just a personal tradeoff between features, downsides, and risks. Most people don't consider the risks at all (implicitly down-weighting that factor), and the value assigned to the features and downsides varies by person. I have some smart lights, because I like the convenience of those lights being on voice control. My TV is "smart" but doesn't get internet because I don't consider the risk of ads acceptable.
This was exactly the nice thing about Zigbee (and Z-Wave). They're not IP networks, they basically just work with any hub, and have no way of phoning home at all. You can use them with Home Assistant or other open source tools or write your own stack if you wanted. The thing that really blows about the switch to matter, is that it is IP based, and it looks like vendors will have another opportunity to tie specific functionality to their own hubs (and probably find a way to exfiltrate telemetry). There really wasn't anything wrong with Zigbee or Z-wave that couldn't be fixed in incremental protocol revisions (IMHO), but they don't generate money the way WiFi devices collecting telemetry or hardware churn for the sake of hardware churn does.
I'm thinking about buying a Dirigera hub instead, using that for the IKEA devices and using the Conbee stick only for non-IKEA products.
Does that work flawlessly when being controlled via HA or are there other issues to be expected?
edit: Maybe even ditch the Conbee stick after all, build some ESPHome devices as replacements (temperature/humidty - or wait for the IKEA version of that).
But it was pretty stable once it was setup. Just occasional reboot on the rPI but I think that was my flakey SMS gateway code.
However, I also bought a 3 SCD41 sensors and ESP32 C3 Superminis from the most reputable sellers on AliExpress, that's been an abject failure. I wanted additional sensors in other rooms less at risk, and wanted to try using ESPHome and putting together my own soldered little devices. Got counterfeit sensors (no laser engraving on the side as Sensiron indicates is without reception the case in genuine parts) and either counterfeit or defective microcontrollers (cannot connect to wifi, even 2.4GHz WPA2, a common enough problem from my research with ). The spread from reputable sellers in NA was absolutely ridiculous and worse then buying premade pieces by a large margin.
All to say, as fun as DIY is, I'm grateful to have trustworthy products available affordably. I'll still block internet access and leave them on a dedicated IoT VLAN, but I can at least not worry it's going to incorrectly label the air quality for a child's bedroom. I'll probably pick up 3 of the CO2 sensors from IKEA, if reviews look good.
Any evidence the Ikea sensor are actual CO2 censors and not just cheap "eCO2" sensors? Lots of the "CO2" censors our there are just cheap VOC censors with an calculation to estimate CO2.
* I can fully control them without the cloud on a non-internet connected network
* I can either pay for updates, or they have free updates for at least 12 years, ideally 15
If a hurricane or tornado strikes, or some dictator tries to tell me what I can and can't do, my devices need to remain under my command.
Regarding the electric switches, I was fond of bypass switches (where you can turn on/off by flipping any of the switches connected to a lamp) and made a lot of them in my apartments. Turned out not all of them were needed. I didn't need much control at home, e.g. I don't need to control the lighting above the kitchen desk when I'm not in front of it.
Wifi switches allow a lot of freedom in positioning and re-positioning them, but they escalate everything to the unreliable realm of IP/internet devices. I'd probably vote for a controller on a lamp, and switches not actually inerrupting 230V~, but be connected with a thin and flat 12V= bus, and just signalling, and hence be easy to put under wallpapers. (5V= would be hard to send further than 3 metres.)
I personally think relays are a much more reliable than solid state switches and are very unlikely to fail in a dangerous way, and fully interupt the circuit, but they do have a 'click' some people dislike, and have a lifetime of 100k-ish switches, so for an application where you keep switching rapidly (e.g. not light switches), this might be a problem.
Ikea used Thread and Zigbee which are not Wifi, they use a mesh network and don't suffer from saturation the way Wifi does, in fact adding more devices tends to make the network more reliable since devices can route around failing or congested nodes.
I've had good experience with them in practice, but do be mindful that they share the 2.4GHz band with Wifi so in an apt building, you might run into radio channel congestion.
Personally I use smart home stuff for controlling heating devices and a few other key items, I don't think it makes sense to make every light switch smart, but technically people have done so and it tends to work all right.
As for software updates, they can be updated, but these devices are so simple they can be reasonably bug free after a while - and security's not a concern (that much) since they don't really have internet access.
Some devices were known to have vulnearbilities where the attacker was physically present to get in radio contact with the device, but those are pretty rare and impossible to exploit en masse.
That said, it is entirely up to you how you would configure the system that the thread border router connects to. Thread specification uses local addresses for the thread devices, so in order for these devices to get access out into the public internet you would need to NAT the IPv6 pretty much (or the devices would have to be smart enough to figure out a globally routable IP address, via e.g. DHCP.) At the same time since it is all bog-standard IPv6, you also get full control with firewall rules, NAT/forwarding and such.
Overall you'd need either a very unusual device or a major misconfiguration off the beaten path to get thread devices talking on the public internet.
I was under the impression IPv6 doesn't need NAT. But you're saying they only get unique local addresses, so even with a border router bridging the connection back to my local Wi-Fi network they still can't send packets out to the internet? "They would have to ask DHCP for a real IP first" doesn't seem like much of a barrier.
How it works in Home Assistant afaik is that the border router is a piece of software running in docker that has access to the radio, and then HA talks to the thread devices via the virtual network interface of Docker.
For Matter (regardless of network connectivity - WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread) this is part of the certification, the devices must be controllable locally and without internet connectivity at least for basic or core functions.
For Zigbee there's no such thing. Zigbee is the network protocol and the manufacturers usually implemented whatever communication protocol they wanted on top. This is why my Tado thermostats that communicate with the hub over Zigbee aren't compatible with any other hub and need the cloud connectivity even when integrated with HA [0][1].
[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tado/
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...
A lot of devices are not compliant though and either have extra functionality exposed in a nonstandard way, or don't comform to the standard well enough.
So your Zigbee light switch will probably workout any fuss regardless of vendor but more complex devices might not.
That's exactly the problem, there was no standard protocol for communication over Zigbee. Manufacturers could implement whatever they wanted on top of it and put the Zigbee logo, like you can put the WiFi logo on a device that speaks a proprietary protocol over WiFi. You bought into an ecosystem and if you wanted a device from outside of it, you needed another hub.
> So your Zigbee light switch will probably workout any fuss
Big "depends". Out of the box it will only work for the few manufacturers who look to be compatible with some other hubs. I tested a lot of basic devices (simple switches or bulbs) with various hubs with little success. Philips, IKEA, Bosch, Tuya, Aqara, Osram, etc. Couldn't discover, add, or control them properly without the corresponding hub.
If you use a device with HA and a Zigbee stick (router/coordinator) then you benefit from a lot of development done in the background to "translate" between all the variations. But that's not something non-techies want to deal with, it's too much of a hassle.
This is the problem that Matter solves. Certified devices must implement the standard communication protocol over the network of choice. So no matter the manufacturer, if I see a Matter logo I know the device will work with my Matter.
Maybe this will get better with time, but we're half a decade into the Matter era and the end-user experience is _worse_ than with ZigBee. In that sense, Matter has failed.
Nowadays, from what I've seen, Zigbee devices seem to be based on a couple of good ICs (and software stacks), which are inexpensive and battle tested.
Forgive me, I don't have a comprehensive experience on what standard does exactly what and how, but from what I've read Matter is a no go for homemade stuff - you need to go through cert for the hubs to talk to you.
As for out of the box support, I've read mixed things - I've heard that for many devices that are Matter compatible (more particularly, the Aqara W100 thermostat), you can't do everything the device supports via Matter that you can do with more proprietary APIs. Considering many of these companies are pushing their own ecosystems, they have an incentive to keep an advantage. Many people are already going for using Thread without Matter.
I feel like Matter is like the joke where they try to solve N competing standards by adding another one, and experience shows this isnt the way to go. The way to go is what Home Assistant does - they keep an open ecosystem with support for plugins, and for example for Zigbee, they implement the 'quirks' of your device into the framework, so you don't have to deal with it.
Pros: very inexpensive, and they look great. Cons: WiFi/ble only, they feel cheap, dimmers don't support a "transition" comment, so you cant dim over time easily.
I was working on some Golang code, talking to them via the very open ConBee II ZigBee gateway. Great fun, and very fast once I got subscribe vs polling working. So now I get an SMS for door access, but kinda hopefully never for a water leak.
No interest in yet another 'standard', especially since Matter seems to mandate PKI device attestation. ZigBee just feels more open to me, and I have enough eWaste devices with expired certificates.
I have some Thread/Matter smart bulbs, and they work well, but Ikea joining in shows that it's finally ready for the mass market.
73 more comments available on Hacker News