Matter, the smart home standard that Apple, Google and Amazon, among others, are working on, has been postponed to 2022. The final specification was expected this fall, but this release timeline has been pushed back by several months to the first half of next year.
Members of the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the group responsible for Matter, will get a preview of the standard for its final release in 2022 before voting on the specification at the end of this year. This is reported by an iot journalist Stacey Higginbotham. The CEO of the CSA, Tobin Richardson, could not narrow the time frame for the release of the specification beyond the “first half of next year.”
With that, developers have to wait until the first half of 2022 for the Matter SDK, the start of an official certification program and the first certified devices using the standard. According to Higginbotham, this would mean that the first consumer Matter devices will not hit the market until the second half of next year.
The CSA CEO is said to have given several reasons for the delay, including the resurgence of the corona pandemic, the recent addition of 29 more companies to the Matter project and “the challenge of delivering a high-quality SDK as part of the specification.” . Initially the specification was scheduled for the first half of this year, but the group behind Matter announced in May that it would be delayed to autumn 2021 and now to the first half of next year.
Development of Matter started in late 2019, when Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Google, SmartThings and The Zigbee Alliance teamed up to develop a universal standard for smart home devices. Several companies and individuals are now participating in the project, including Huawei, IKEA, NXP and Signify. The standard was initially called Project CHIP, short for Project Connected Home over IP, before being renamed Matter.
According to the makers, the Matter standard for smart home devices would have several advantages. With this universal standard, consumers would, for example, not have to wonder whether smart devices can work together. According to the CSA, it should also ensure that developers do not have to develop their own protocols, which saves time in the development of smart home products.