Matter 1.3 Released to Support Smart Home Appliances
Matter 1.3 Technical Specification Released, Adds Energy and Water Management Device Support, Major Appliance Types, Entertainment Experience, and Smart Home Management Features Enhanced user experience, including core improvements such as scene setting and batch commands. Enhanced debugging and development experience, improved network configuration process, feature set revisions, and SDKXML tools. The Matter 1.3 Working Group is committed to advancing the technical specification and improving the user experience, with more enhancements and additions expected in future releases.
The Connected Standards Alliance is pleased to release the latest update to the Matter technical specification and SDK for version Matter 1.3, welcoming device manufacturers and smart home platforms to apply it to their products. This latest release marks another critical step forward in the standard’s development, allowing smart devices to provide more assistance to users in the kitchen and laundry room, enhance screen-based entertainment experiences and interactions with the smart home, and make the smart home more efficient and secure through new energy and water management.
Additional water and energy management equipment support
Energy Management: To help users understand and manage their energy usage to save money and reduce their carbon footprint, Matter 1.3 adds Energy Reporting, allowing any device to report actual or estimated measurements in real-time, including instantaneous power, voltage, current, etc., as well as energy consumption or generation over time.
Electric Vehicle Charging: The energy features of Matter 1.3 also enable new energy-centric devices, starting with the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) that allows EV charging equipment manufacturers to provide a more consumer-friendly way to control how and when their vehicles are charged. For example, charging can be started or stopped manually, the rate of charging can be adjusted, or the amount of range to be added by a set departure time can be specified, allowing charging stations to automatically optimize the charging process to charge at the time when it is cheapest to use electricity and least carbon intensive.
Water Management: Support for leak detectors, freeze detectors, rain sensors, and controllable water valves will help homeowners enhance the monitoring, management, and protection of water in and around the home.
Addition of major appliance types
Newly supported device types include:
1. Microwave ovens: Users can control the cooking time, power level, and mode of operation and receive notifications when the microwave oven has completed its operation, such as “end of run” or “food ready”. For microwave ovens that are mounted explicitly above the stovetop, the specification also supports control of the extractor fan and lights that are typically configured with the unit.
2. Ovens: The Matter 1.3 update includes support for multiple ovens, such as built-in ovens, stand-alone ovens, or ovens with an integrated cooktop on top. Each oven compartment can be controlled individually, including the operating modes (Standard, Convection Bake, Toast, Steam, Braise/Grill, Greaseproof) and temperature setting angles are carried out, and information related to the oven status (i.e., preheat or cool) is provided. Notifications such as preheat and target temperature reached are supported.
3. Cookstoves: Matter 1.3 supports cookstoves, allowing remote access and control (typically of sensor-based devices). Individual elements of the stove can be temperature-controlled and measured (where permitted by regulations).
4. Range hoods (cooker hoods, ventilation hoods): Matter 1.3 supports stoves and hobs used in conjunction with range hoods, enabling control of lights and fans configured with such equipment, as well as monitoring the status/reached end of life of the filter material used (e.g., HEPA filters).
5. Dryers: Matter 1.2 already included support for washing machines, and Matter 1.3 completes the package by adding support for dryers. Users can set dryer modes and target temperatures, start and stop the dryer remotely if local safety regulations allow, and send notifications such as “end of run” and manufacturer-specified error status alerts.
Enhanced entertainment and smart home management for media devices
Matter Casting Media Player/TV: Matter 1.3 features enhancements to the TV, including support for push messages and dialogs for immersive experiences, enhancements to cast screen initialization, expansion of the TV app interaction options, text and track support, and improvements to the search function. Interaction with other devices in the home has also been enhanced, enabling other Matter devices to send notifications to the TV or other devices with a screen (e.g., sending an alert for a stuck sweeper, notification that laundry is done, etc.)
Other new features and core improvements
The latest update to Matter doesn’t just add new device types and functionality; it also includes a number of new features and core improvements to enhance the Matter user experience.
User Experience Enhancement
Scenes: Matter can now support scene settings, providing product manufacturers and smart home platforms with a standardized process to set, read, and activate scenes on devices. Scenes allow users to trigger settings for multiple devices with a single command to reach a desired state for a device, room, or the entire home. For example, a user can set up a scene that defines a specific color and brightness for each of multiple lighting fixtures and can use a single command to synchronize those lights to achieve the defined state. Devices are also able to store the scenes to which they belong, reducing the number of individual commands needed to perform scene transitions to improve responsiveness.
Batch Commands: Matter control devices can now combine multiple commands into a single message for batch processing when communicating with Matter devices, minimizing the delay between the execution of these commands. For example, when used with a Matter bridge, batch commands can control multiple devices, allowing the bridge to provide a more synchronized experience. Common examples include minimizing the “popcorn effect” that sometimes occurs in intelligent lighting applications.
Improved debugging and development experience
Improved Network Configuration Flow: The network configuration flow now enables devices to report which WiFi bands they support. Mandatory support for Wi-Fi Directional Scanning improves configuration success rates and enables easier debugging with connection error reporting during the configuration process. For Thread devices, the Network Configuration feature set (Cluster) now adds attributes that send the device’s Thread version and supported features.
Event Timestamp Synchronization: Event timestamps can be synchronized across devices even if a single device does not support time synchronization.
Extended Beacon Cycle: Allows devices to use longer beacon (or “broadcast announcement”) times, providing a larger window of time for the first distribution of user equipment.
Feature Set Revisions: Noteworthy revisions have been made to several feature sets, including Basic Information, Channels, Door Lock, General Diagnostics, Media Playback, Network Configuration, Power, and Thermostat.
Automatically generated SDK XML feature set descriptions based on specification text: A new tool simplifies the harmonization between Matter technical specifications and SDK features. The tool makes it easier to develop new standard feature sets. It also helps to promote interoperability, as the tool can be utilized to avoid discrepancies between the technical specification and the Matter 1.3 SDK, thus improving the consistency of the standard implementation.
Challenges remain for Matter to get off the ground
While the Matter 1.3 standard has some obvious benefits, many products still lack Matter support. This is due in part to the high cost of Matter implementation – products may require additional internal hardware to work with Matter, and CSA certification costs about $10,000 per product. However, one of the biggest obstacles facing Matter is that its functionality is somewhat limited. For example, the original Matter 1.0 version did not support energy monitoring in smart outlets, and Matter 1.3 remedies these shortcomings.
There are still significant challenges to getting the Matter ecosystem off the ground, and the chair of the Connectivity Standards Alliance member group believes it can be viewed from three perspectives:
First of all, the smart home market has been promoted for many years. However, all the smart home enterprises are still in the depths of entanglement and arduous exploration, which has not really brought everyone great commercial success.
Secondly, the cognitive challenge. Matter can’t actually help enterprises solve some specific business problems. Still, it hopes to help each enterprise integrate into the smart home business through the field of expertise and its advantages. What Matter provides to everyone is more opportunities and possibilities.
In addition, in the overall competitive landscape, the current smart home interoperability experience is still relatively fragmented. There are a large number of private ecosystems, which may require a period of acceptance and integration process to move towards a more open and inclusive ecosystem, but there is no doubt that interoperability will be the direction of development in the future.
Future Outlook
Matter is a universal standard designed to remove barriers between different smart home ecosystems and is supported by Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung, so if a smart bulb is advertised as “Matter-enabled,” consumers should be confident that it will work with all smart home ecosystems and voice assistants. So, if a smart bulb is advertised as “Matter-enabled,” consumers should be confident that it will work with all smart home ecosystems and voice assistants.
With the continuous evolution and promotion of the Matter 1.3 standard, more growth and application expansion of smart home products supporting Matter 1.3 are expected. Currently, there are many traditional enterprises represented by door locks, lighting, cross-border Internet of Things, or intelligent upgrading and transformation. In the face of the Matter trend, design costs, technical thresholds, recovery cycle, and other factors have become the application of such enterprises concerns.
All in all, Matter represents not only quality development optimization for smart home products’ universal system compatibility but also reliable security benchmarks and robust interoperability and is expected to become the de facto smart home standard, delivering on its expected “connected” promise for users and the market. With the release of version Matter 1.3, Matter will continue to expand its presence in the smart home industry and the IoT ecosystem.