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2023 in the smart home: Matter’s broken promises
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Pretty weird that such a long article doesn't even mention Home Assistant once.
I understand that it's not the easiest to set up for the average person, but given how much pain all these online services and different hubs have caused the author, it's weird that it doesn't even get a shout-out.
IMO it’s precisely because it’s complicated and the opposite of the goals of Matter.
People in tech bubbles like HA. Normal people wouldn’t want anything to do with it.
And in some ways, HA pacifies tech enthusiasts. Leaving a messy fragmented landscape of devices for normal people.
HA seems to be trying to build the pyramid bottom up, rather than top down.
Currently they have basically integrated everything they can. They have also grown to the point where new integrations get added quickly and effectively.
Their recent aim seems to have been simplification. YAML, while still available, have been pushed out of the learning requirements. There are now more and more GUIs and assistance.
The next step looks to be simplifying this further. At this point, they are approaching the simplicity other products try and start from. The "year of the voice" and the natural language processing that entails are an excellent launch point for this.
In short, they have built an excellent foundation layer. They have now added interfaces with a learning curve shallower than a brick wall. Next they seem to be aiming to add simplified interfaces for Joe public to understand. You'll still be able to drill down for complex tasks, but that will be a choice, not a requirement.
To me this seems the best way to build a winning solution. The top down approaches seem prone to lock in, or limited capabilities.
My smart home is Homekit + Homebridge based and I don't have that much smart devices so I'm not super up to date. The way I understand this, Matter is supposed to make Homebridge unnecessary and after many delays it finally happened to some degree, hence inclusion in "year in review" type of article. I know of Home Assistant but did it get any big updates this year?
The thing that articles often miss is that HomeAssistant isn't designed to be another protocol, it's more like one UI wrapping up all the other protocols.
You buy different bits of kit, and so long as they're not made my a shitty manufacturer that locks everything down, homeassistant will likely work with them all once people have had time to add support.
A pretty good explanation!
This year was officially called 'Year of the voice', so that was the main focuse, but pretty much every monthly update comes with all sorts of neat enhancements, including plenty of improvements to the Matter/Threads integration.