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Inside the room where the smart home industry is still betting on Matter

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June 28, 2026 · 1:00 AM

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Inside the room where the smart home industry is still betting on Matter

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Inside the room where the smart home industry is still betting on Matter

At the CSA’s inaugural Unify conference, the mood was optimistic but realistic. Matter hasn’t delivered on its promise, but I left convinced that it still can.

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by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Senior Reviewer, Smart Home

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Jun 27, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC

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Image: CSA

Part Of All the smart home news, reviews, and gadgets you need to know about see all updates

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Follow See All by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.

Four years ago, overlooking a canal in Amsterdam, the smart home industry collectively launched Matter, the one interoperability standard to rule them all. Heralded as the solution to the industry’s struggles, Matter was built on open standards and existing technologies and is the result of years of collaboration between traditional rivals, including Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung.

Matter promised an end to walled gardens and ecosystem lock-in. It promised to make a smart home device, like a lock, lightbulb, or sensor, easy to buy and set up. It promised you could choose any brand, use any platform, no expertise required — it would just work.

“Matter long-term won’t be successful until everybody can use it at parity. That’s the goal. And all the companies know that.”

— Tobin Richardson, CSA

It didn’t. Today, Matter is still not there. Adding devices to your smart home is still cumbersome and finicky; sharing them across ecosystems can be unreliable, and some features users expect aren’t part of Matter and still require the manufacturer’s app. But, based on what I saw at the Unify conference in Austin, Texas, last week, Matter is much closer to its promise of a simple, reliable, interoperable smart home.

Following a rocky launch and years of broken promises, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) designated 2025 as the year to fix Matter — and I have seen significant improvements. This year at Unify, the CSA’s first public-facing event since the Amsterdam launch of Matter, version 1.6 of the spec was announced.

Related

The most significant new feature, Joint Fabric, will let you create a single smart home network that can be controlled by any Matter platform — which is the Matter we thought we were getting all along.

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