The Matter upgrade smart homes were actually waiting for
Matter was announced in 2022 as the standard that would finally let smart-home gear from different brands talk to each other. For three years the honest answer to "does Matter work?" was "sort of, if you don't need it to."
The June release from Home Assistant is the first one where we'd change that answer.
What was broken before
The promise was: buy any Matter device, pair it with any Matter controller, everything works. The reality was that device makers implemented the parts of the spec they cared about, controllers implemented a slightly different subset, and the overlap was smaller than anyone wanted to admit. You'd pair a light and get on/off but not colour temperature. You'd pair a sensor and get a reading with no battery status.
The result was a standard that reduced choice instead of expanding it — you still ended up buying whatever your existing hub definitely supported.
What changed
The upgrade closes most of that gap. Devices expose more of what they can actually do, more device types are properly handled, and the pairing path is markedly less fragile. In practice: fewer devices that connect but half-work.
It's not finished. But it's crossed the line from "interesting standard" to "reasonable basis for buying decisions", which is the line that matters if you're spending money.
Should you rebuild around it?
No — and we'd be sceptical of anyone who says otherwise.
If you already have a working Zigbee or Z-Wave setup, it works. Rip-and-replace buys you nothing you can feel. What changes is the next device you buy: Matter support is now a sensible tiebreaker where before it was close to meaningless.
The one case for moving deliberately is if you're locked into a cloud-dependent ecosystem and want out. Matter plus a local controller like Home Assistant gets you a house that keeps working when the internet doesn't — which, for heating and hot water in a Melbourne winter, is not a small thing.
That local-first setup is what we build. If you want a smart home that survives an outage and doesn't need a subscription, see how we do it.
Source: Home Assistant — Announcements