Matter’s getting an upgrade to make smart home setups even simpler

One of the ongoing headaches with smart homes is setting them up. However, a new version of Matter, the smart home interoperability standard, hopes to change that.

The newly announced Matter 1.4 addresses some key omissions in the existing standard, and that should mean much simpler smart home setups in the future.

Matter is two years old now, and it's fair to say it hasn't quite set the world on fire. While it's supported by key tech firms including Amazon, Google and Apple, it hasn't rolled out very quickly and setting things up can sometimes be frustrating still. Matter 1.4 should fix that, and also add more device categories to its compatibility list.

What's new in Matter 1.4?

One of the big new features is enhanced multi-admin. This improves the existing feature that's supposed to make all your different manufacturers' devices play nicely with each other, even if they're from different ecosystems. It will make Thread border routers work better with one another, and should make it easier to add Matter via Wi-Fi routers and access points too.

There are other key improvements too. There are updates to the energy management support to include heat pumps, home battery storage and solar panels under the Matter banner, but the planned support for security cameras hasn't yet arrived. It's still on the to-do list, although there's no official date for its arrival.

As for Matter 1.4, what's happened here is just publication of the latest specification. The next step is for manufacturers to actually use it.

That's where the promise may lose some of its lustre, because new Matter devices don't have to adopt every part of the Matter specification, while old ones don't have be updated when there's a newer version.

That means we're dependent on manufacturers not just to roll out the newer spec, but to roll out all of it. And even the ones who do support the standard may take time.

Speaking to The Verge, Amazon promised updates to supported Eero and Echo devices early next year, but neither Google nor Apple were able to give a timeline.