Matter Support Is Delayed Till at Least Fall

Matter Support Is Delayed (by @benceboros on Unsplash)

The smart home standard Matter, supported by Amazon, Apple, and Google, among others, will no longer appear in the first half of 2022. Instead, devices will only come with updates for Matter support in the fall of this year.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance says it needs more time to improve the quality and stability of the code. Therefore, the testing and validation phases of Matter are being extended and the public release of Matter 1.0 is being delayed by ‘several months’. The CSA says that due to this delay, there will be more devices that support Matter at release.

As part of the extended testing and validation phase, there will be an additional ninth testing event during spring. The final step in the phase is the Matter Specification Validation Event, where the CSA will validate Matter with 130 devices from more than 50 companies. According to the CSA, this step is crucial in certifying those products and validating the Matter standard.

After the Specification Validation Event, Matter can be finalized, requiring the 1.0 version to be ready by the fall. After that, companies can officially validate their devices for Matter. The CSA, therefore, expects manufacturers to announce Matter products and updates around that time.

It’s not the first time Matter has been delayed. For example, when announcing the name change from Project CHIP to Matter, the CSA said the first products would be released at the end of 2021; later this became the first half of 2022. Matter is a smart home standard that should allow devices from different manufacturers to work together, as long as they support Matter. In addition to the aforementioned companies, parties such as SmartThings, The Zigbee Alliance, IKEA, and Signify are also working on Matter.

Read more about Matter and Philips Hue in this post!