Matter feels a little bit doomed.
Manufacturers want to lock people into their systems.
Enthusiastic techies want devices to support the standards that are already working, and often to avoid IP where possible.
General consumers just want the device to do the thing, and will happily use the manufacturer’s lock app.
Matter sits in the middle, and somehow misses both camps.
The techies don’t like it, because it’s adding yet another standard to adhere to/break.
And the general consumers won’t even notice, they’ll just use the app the manufacturer suggests on the box.
nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de 11 months ago
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.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
cynar@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
misk@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
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?
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 11 months ago
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.
nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de 11 months ago
This year was mostly focused on making voice much better, but pretty much every monthly update comes with all sorts of neat enhancements, including plenty of improvements to the Matter implementation.