5 Ways Smart Home Device Manufacturers Can Be Smart About Matter

The Matter smart home connectivity standard promises to address interoperability and increase consumer smart home adoption. Finally, devices from different manufacturers will be able to work together easily, communicating across the home network effortlessly.

This is great news for anyone using smart home devices, as well as for manufacturers interested in easier, less costly IoT development and the potential for wider customer adoption. But by leveling the playing field, Matter also makes it harder for device makers to stand out from the crowd with differentiated products.

Makers of smart home devices need to be smart about how to prepare for the Matter era. Here are five considerations for manufacturers interested in delivering high-quality, competitively differentiated Matter smart home products.

1. Evaluate whether your existing smart home products are Matter-ready—& what it will take to get them there.

To support the Matter protocol, existing devices must be able to communicate over Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or Thread, and they need sufficient memory and processing power.

2. Anticipate what your customers will expect from your products in a Matter-enabled smart home

The Matter standard comes with big promises of interoperability, and users will have high expectations for how their smart home will function. Behind the scenes, though, it will be up to device manufacturers to develop the software to meet those expectations.

For example, you might want to upgrade your mobile app to address how your devices could be enhanced by interactions with other manufacturers’ products.

3. Understand what the Matter standard doesn’t cover

Matter represents a huge breakthrough for device compatibility, but it doesn’t provide a comprehensive smart home solution. For instance, Matter doesn’t concern itself with how smart IoT devices connect to the cloud, the management of smart devices or their users, setting schedules for smart home products, supporting non-Matter devices, providing data analytics, or anything about the design and development of mobile apps used to control smart devices.

These capabilities are integral to the value of smart home products. For users, important attributes include device schedules and high-quality mobile apps. For device makers, many essential features are not addressed by Matter, including cloud access, over-the-air (OTA) upgrades, and other features to improve service levels, reduce management costs, add new revenue streams, and improve future product versions.

4. Think about all the dimensions of privacy and trust

It’s a given that you need to ensure that your smart home devices are thoroughly tested and production-ready with all the latest security measures, privacy standards, and compliance in place. Your customers need to know that your devices will keep their data secure and managed under local privacy guidelines and laws.

Increasingly important for home users and manufacturers alike is geopolitical risk. You and your customers want the comfort of knowing that customer information and device usage data are secure from external influences.

5. Decide how you will offer competitive differentiation

To ensure that your offerings will rise above generic, commodity solutions, now is the time to rethink your value propositions and contemplate how your Matter devices can provide a superior user experience.

One Final Consideration...

For many smart home device makers, the easiest and best way to prepare for the Matter era is simple. Build your smart home products on the foundation of a leading IoT platform, such as Ayla Networks.

The Ayla IoT platform reliably transforms any device into a smart connected product. It is used by major brands, supporting millions of connected devices.

To get more information on Ayla’s one-stop U.S.-based shop for Matter devices, firmware, cloud platform, and a 5-star rated mobile app visit the Ayla Matter webpage.