The word “matter” may still be unfamiliar to you today, but if you’re interested in the smart home space, it won’t be for long. Matter is here as the universal standard for smart home gadgets across the industry, and Google wants you to know that your Android phone and Google Nest devices already support it.
Ever heard of Matter before? Excellent. Let’s talk about it briefly, the smart home friend.
Matter is an industry-level standard for smart home gadgets that makes it easy for you to set them up and connect them to each other. Google and hundreds of industry partners worked together for 3 years to standardize Matter because everyone recognized that setting up smart home products was a huge pain.
With everything from Google to Samsung to Apple and Amazon, as well as all the smart lights and thermostats and other devices you use, managing and connecting and setting up your smart home is accepted by everyone. Just work. And that’s really what you need to take away from the subject.
As part of an announcement today, Google confirmed that its Google Home and Nest Hub devices are ready for Matter Even the original Google Home and Google Home Mini support matter. Of course, so does the new Nest Hub and Audio. 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 & 2nd Generation)
- Nest Hub Max
- Nest Wifi Pro
It’s important that Google has added Matter support to these, because to take advantage of Matter, you’ll need a hub, such as one of these. And since many of you probably own one, you’re good!
Going forward, when you walk into Best Buy or shop for smart home goodies online, you’ll want to pay attention and look for products with the Matter logo (above). If it has, you’ll be able to set them up in seconds in some cases. If you use your Android phone to do this, Fast Pair can take and Literally Do the job with a few taps.
Since you’re likely using Samsung SmartThings or another smart home platform, understand that Matter will make it easy for your various setups to talk to each other. Samsung and Google are already working on this, plus the Google Home app will soon let you know if there are Matter devices setup via SmartThings so you can easily onboard them into the Home if you want.
So there you have it – a brief chat about the matter and what it means for the future of smart home gadgets. If all goes well, you may not need to learn about Matter much longer, as hopefully everyone will adopt it and the days of old smart home setup problems will be behind us.