Anti-Matter: Why I've had enough of the new smart home standard for now
All smart home devices on one platform: sounds good. But in practice, it has many pitfalls and offers little added value, says Schwan, who comes from HomeKit.
Matter logo and a black hole: Why is the standard not moving forward?
(Image: MattL_Images/Shutterstock.com)
The heating season is starting. It would be nice if my smart thermostats could adapt to the room temperature a little better than they currently do because the integrated thermometer is located directly on the radiator.
The German and, more recently, Swedish-Swiss provider Eve has something in store: Thermo Control, a long-awaited piece of hardware that should be able to communicate directly with my Eve Thermo thermostats. But for this to work, I not only need Thermo Control with its pretty display, which can be placed anywhere in the room, but I also need to "upgrade" my Eve Thermo thermostat from the tried-and-tested HomeKit to Matter. Because that, at least Eve tries to make me believe in its advertising, will make everything better. After all, it's a common smart home standard from major manufacturers who are finally talking to each other!
A progress bar that doesn't move
However, my upgrade process then turns into a nightmare. No matter what I do, it just gets stuck. I unplug the Apple TV 4K and only leave the HomePod mini on. I try it the other way around, hoping that the gods of short-range radio will have mercy on me. But the iPhone stubbornly shows the non-moving progress bar, the migration firmware doesn't land on the Thermo. At least the HomeKit firmware is retained and I can continue to control the thermostat.
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Finally, I remember to try it with the Mac, because the Eve app for the upgrade is also running on it. And lo and behold, the process actually goes through. With one tiny problem: during the Matter transition, the device is first removed from HomeKit and then "re-paired", i.e. added again, with a new Matter-statt-HomeKit code. But this step is simply not possible on the Mac, because you can't add any devices with it – which is again down to Apple –!
So I have to try pairing manually after the upgrade. And nothing happens. The new code is accepted, but the Eve Thermo with its new Matter firmware is not found. The temperature data from the last few weeks, which the Eve app had previously saved, is of course also completely gone because the re-pairing didn't work. In the end, the only thing left to do was to reset the Thermo. Including a complete reset of my automations. And I haven't even started setting up the Thermo Control yet.
Matter promised us a lot
This is by no means the only case of problematic Matter behavior. I don't want to explicitly bash Eve –, a company that has built a lot of good HomeKit hardware in the past –, even if they are particularly enthusiastic about Matter. Because everywhere in the smart home scene you can hear that there are still a lot of problems – even from manufacturers directly. For example, not all of the functions in Matter that previous systems have have been implemented; motion detectors have suddenly become presence sensors. According to the manufacturer, the Eve Thermo's window-opening detection does not currently work reliably in conjunction with sensors of the same brand. "We strive to give you the same level of comfort under Matter that you are used to", Eve writes – as if you shouldn't expect an "upgrade" to keep all existing features working.
The setup is always a horror. Sometimes it's Thread, sometimes it's the Wi-Fi, which seems to intervene in a magical, crazy way. That's why I recently remodeled the entire router technology in my office, because I had read on the Internet that my old Eero Matter apparently doesn't like Thread (anymore). Why? It's just the way it is! Sometimes it also helps to simply restart the iPhone if the setup process goes haywire. Nobody understands that.
I can only advise users who are largely happy living in the HomeKit universe (which itself is by no means problem-free) to stick with pure HomeKit hardware for as long as this is still possible. If you have to switch to Matter for new devices, that's fine. But then they should come from the factory with this new (but not necessarily better) technology. The fundamental problem is that, from my perspective, Matter currently offers no real added value compared to HomeKit. However, the mere fact that potentially more devices are running – some are rather crooked – is an advantage. The feature set is either the same or even smaller. Incidentally, if you are looking for the advantages of the fast-switching Thread short-range radio, you can still find (even recently released!) devices on the market that only support HomeKit and Thread and do not need Matter. In a pure HomeKit network, this is completely okay if you want to remain "single-variety" and don't want to switch to a different smart home standard at some point.
Only upgrade if you have to
A central "pain point", as mentioned in detail here, is updating HomeKit devices to Matter. In my opinion, this is currently simply not worth the effort and hassle – unless it is a necessity, as with Eve Thermo and Eve Thermo Control, because a device only works with Matter. But you shouldn't just "upgrade" to Matter because it works now, because that's not really an upgrade.
In the worst-case scenario, you could lose hours of battery life or even important smart home data, as in this example. Or you can recreate your carefully maintained setup after a device reset or, as was the case for me at the beginning, no longer be able to integrate it at all.
I therefore can't understand all the hype surrounding Matter – and the inactivity of the Matter consortium, which apparently puts up with the chaos, either. Perhaps there are simply too many companies involved. You may think what you like about Apple's "Walled Garden", but with HomeKit problems there was at least only one person responsible to get upset about ...
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