The ‘Matter’ suite of standard protocols was first released in Fall 2022 and promised an interoperable smart-home ecosystem where devices from different manufacturers could seamlessly communicate. In this work, we study the Matter integration of the smart-home devices sold in the current market. We conducted a systematic, qualitative study of Matter’s integration in the products manufactured by major IoT companies.
We find that across the most-common platforms – Google Nest Hub (Google Home), Apple HomePod Mini (Apple HomeKit), Samsung SmartThings Station (Samsung SmartThings), and Amazon Echo Dot (Amazon Alexa) – the commissioning mechanisms vary in user-friendliness. While Apple and Samsung offer some level of support for creating automation rules, Amazon and Google lack direct mechanisms, highlighting the variability in ecosystem capabilities for integrating and automating legacy and Matter devices. Additionally, we find differences in multi-admin features and in user interfaces for the devices.
You can find our insights, valuable for consumers and smart-home-device industry professionals, in this recent paper at IEEE CCNC25.
Zegeye, Wondimu, Ravindra Mangar, Jingyu Qian, Vinton Morris, Mounib Khanafer, Kevin Kornegay, Timothy J. Pierson, and David Kotz. “Comparing Smart-Home Devices That Use the Matter Protocol.” In 2025 IEEE 22nd Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC), 1–6, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC54725.2025.10976049.
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