Ikea smart home failings point to a major problem with Matter

Ikea smart home products have long been the preferred choice of those who want to begin or expand a smart home at an affordable price. The company’s use of physical remotes also simplified the process for those new to the technology.

But when the company expanded its lineup with some budget Matter-over-Thread devices, things rather quickly headed south – with Apple Home users among those affected …

We saw a growing number of complaints from frustrated users who were often unable to even add the devices to their smart home networks. Ikea acknowledged the problem, and gave a hint as to its nature.

That statement appeared to point to a more fundamental issue with the Matter standard, and a new report by The Verge says this is indeed the case.

What has become clear since Matter’s enthusiastic launch is that Apple, Google, and Amazon are now fully focused on pursuing their own agendas. The cooperative spirit that defined the standard’s early development has stalled, and it’s every platform for itself in the race for users.

Rather than being a plug-and-play solution for manufacturers — make a Matter device, and it will just work with any platform — there remains a huge onus on each manufacturer to ensure its devices work properly with each platform before release. Which is basically the same problem they had before Matter launched.

The site’s Jennifer Tuohy was personally affected by this and went looking for solutions. She found a video by A Smarter House which tried all of the various approaches that have been proposed in various forums and found that there was no single fix. Here’s what they found for those using Apple Home:

Matter had one job, and it seems to be failing at it.

Even if all the various smart home platforms only care about growing their own user base, it is still in their interests to fix this because the simplicity of a single standard is what can finally turn smart home technology into a completely mainstream thing.

Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash