Matter marks four years, but smart home interoperability still lags

Matter 1.4 arrived on November 7, 2024, adding syncing across ecosystems, home network infrastructure support and new energy management devices, the latest upgrade to a standard first accepted for release by the Connectivity Standards Alliance board on September 28, 2022. Four years after its Amsterdam debut, Matter is still being judged against a basic promise: devices from different brands should work together without turning setup into a recurring chore.

Matter began in December 2019 as Project Connected Home over IP, or CHIP, launched by Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance. The effort was later renamed Matter, and the Connectivity Standards Alliance announced Matter 1.0 and opened the certification program on October 4, 2022, after the board had already accepted the release six days earlier.

The public launch came on November 3, 2022, in Amsterdam, where industry leaders showcased the first Matter products and described the moment as a major inflection point for the internet of things. The Connectivity Standards Alliance now says it brings together more than 550 technology companies, and it continues to present Matter as an industry-unifying standard built on proven technologies.

The standard’s own technical language shows how ambitious the project was from the start. Matter 1.0 was defined as an interoperable application-layer solution for smart home devices over internet protocol, a specification meant to sit above the brand silos that have long made smart homes feel fragmented. In practice, the test has always been whether that promise reaches ordinary households, where compatibility problems and repeated setup steps have frustrated consumers for years.

The release cadence shows steady progress. Matter 1.1 followed in May 2023, Matter 1.2 in October 2023, Matter 1.3 in May 2024 and Matter 1.4 in November 2024. Each step expanded the standard’s reach, but the central question remains whether Apple, Amazon, Google and the rest of the industry can deliver real interoperability in American homes, or whether Matter simply resets expectations while the everyday work of making devices talk to one another stays the same.