The word “Matter” may still be unfamiliar to you today, but it won’t be for long if you are at all interested in the smart home space. Matter is here as the universal standard of smart home gadgets across the industry and Google wants you to know that your Android phone and Google Nest devices already support it.
Have never heard of Matter before? That’s cool. Let’s talk briefly about it, smart home friend.
Matter is an industry-level standard for smart home gadgets that makes it easier for you to set them up and connect to each other. Google and hundreds of industry partners worked together for 3 years to make Matter the standard because everyone was able to admit that setting up smart home products was a massive pain the ass.
With Matter adopted by everyone from Google to Samsung to Apple and Amazon, as well as all of the smart lights and thermostats and other devices you use, managing and connecting and setting up your smart home should just work. And that’s really what you need to take away from Matter.
As a part of an announcement today, Google confirmed that their Google Home and Nest Hub devices are ready for Matter. Even the original Google Home and Google Home Mini support Matter. Of course, all of the newer Nest Hubs and Audio do too. The full list of Matter-ready Google devices can be seen below:
- The original Google Home speaker
- Google Home Mini
- Nest Mini
- Nest Audio
- Nest Hub (1st and 2nd gen)
- Nest Hub Max
- Nest Wifi Pro
It’s important that Google added Matter support to these, because in order to take advantage of Matter, you’ll need a hub, like one of these. And since so many of you likely own one, you are good!
Going forward, as you enter Best Buy or shop for smart home goodies online, you’ll want to pay attention and try and spot products with the Matter logo (above). If it has that, you should be able to set those up within a few seconds, in some cases. If you use your Android phone to do so, Fast Pair could take over and literally do the thing in a couple of taps.
Because there’s a chance you use Samsung SmartThings or some other smart home platform, understand that Matter will make it easier for your different setups to talk to each other too. Samsung and Google are already working on this, plus the Google Home app will soon let you know if there are Matter devices setup through SmartThings so you can easily onboard those to Home if you want.
So there you have it – that’s a brief chat about Matter and what it means for the future of smart home gadgets. If all goes well, you might not need to know about Matter for long, as everyone will hopefully adopt it and the days of old smart home setup difficulties will be behind us.
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