Why Smart Homes May Be Getting a Lot Smarter in 2022

The true promise of a “smart home” centers around convenience. Smart devices are supposed to make your day-to-day life easier through simple tech solutions.

Unfortunately, today’s smart technology is anything but simple. There are so many smart brands and smart hubs that it seems nearly impossible to make every device in your home communicate and work together.

That might be about to change in 2022 thanks to a new technological innovation called “Matter.”

According to the company that created it, Matter will allow all the smart devices in your home to work together much more smoothly. Matter does not control any of your devices on its own. Instead, it provides pathways for them to communicate with each other regardless of brand.

Theoretically, that means you could control smart devices from Amazon like the Ring Doorbell with devices from competing brands like Google much more seamlessly. Through Matter, smart devices could realize their full potential and create a unified “smart home” experience.

“Taking an open-source SDK [software development kit] approach means everyone that develops a Matter device can use the same code base,” said Tobin Richardson, CEO of the Connectivity Standards Alliance and a member of the Matter Standards Working Group. “That’s an absolutely critical element to ensuring rapid adoption and market success — but we need to get it right.

“The ultimate goal remains to deliver a specification and SDK that delivers on our promise to create a common language for the smart home and improve consumer smart home experiences and spur greater innovation.”

Matter’s emergence could encourage major brands to make their smart devices work together in the early stages of development, creating cross-brand products that can be mixed and matched. Hopefully, 2022 will be the year smart home technology turn less frustrating and clunky and finally lives up to the intelligence its name implies.