Amazon, Apple and Google team up to certify smart home devices

Amazon, Apple and Google team up to certify smart home devices

New York, 5/18/2021

Tech giants Amazon, Apple and Google have announced their support of Matter, a standard focused on capable and secure smart devices for the home. These devices, also known as Internet of Things (IoT) products, include smart door locks, light bulbs and thermostats.
With a logo showing three arrows symbolizing collaboration, Matter aims to secure smart technology whose products work well together. The three aforementioned organizations will team up with other technology companies to help certify smart home devices later in 2021, with the goal of normalizing such IoT products.
Matter is expected to replace the existing Connected Home over Internet Protocol (CHIP) as the new smart-home alliance. With this technology, developers aim to connect all smart-home devices such as alarm systems, video doorbells, door locks, garage doors, heating home theaters, lighting controls and TVs via smart speakers.
Assuming that Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant are already competing as the user’s personal assistant, Matter provides a solution by ensuring that all three programs work together, so that a user can potentially use more than one or even all three at the same time without conflict. This way, users can control their smart home devices through any personal assistant.
Google also has much praise for Matter, emphasizing the need for a standard because it allows devices from different manufacturers to work together, rather than spending time and money developing a product that works for each specific ecosystem.
So far, the alliance has curated the Matter technology as an open-source, royalty-free project on GitHub. The organization’s marketing team reports that it is developing setup codes that allow users to connect their devices without downloading any apps or connecting to cloud services.
The next major obstacle to the proliferation of Matter devices currently appears to be potential user privacy concerns. After all, given the recent discussion about revamping the iPhone’s app tracking capabilities, users need to know that they can actually trust this new technology.