Good news for smart home enthusiasts and Wyze Labs customers everywhere. According to Make Use Of, the eclectic smart device manufacturer added itself to the long list of companies in support of the new Matter standard by joining the Matter Alliance, and with their inclusion comes another powerful player in helping all smart home product interoperate with one another.
A Brief Overview of Matter
For those unaware of what Matter is, there’s an article we wrote on it previously. Here, however, we’ll give a quick overview of just what this new smart home standard is.
As of right now, there are a massive amount of smart home products, and an equally large number of protocols to ensure that they all play nice with one another. Matter, however, aims to be a new standard (a seal of approval) for customers to feel confident in the reliability and interoperability of multiple smart home products.
It’s also meant to help streamline development of smart products so there’s only one standard manufacturers need to worry about.
Ultimately, the Matter standard boils down to four core operating principles:
- Simplicity
- Interoperability
- Reliability
- Security
If there’s ever been a hiccup in communication between devices, Matter aims to prevent that from happening by standardizing the communication protocols between the two.
What This Means for Current Wyze Labs Customers
Like all others who have joined the Matter Alliance before them, there is a possibility Wyze Labs will need to update their product hardware in order to fully comply with the Matter standard, so the unfortunate reality of that is that existing products may never benefit from it. While Matter is expected to launch at the end of 2021, there is no concrete date where all manufacturers will comply.
Wyze Labs’ addition to the Matter Alliance does further validate the claim, however, that having all devices capable of interacting with one another is the best approach for the smart home industry moving forward.