this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Technology
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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.
I also don't like Matter because it removes a barrier that provides security benefits. As things stand currently if you're using Zigbee or Zwave for smart device connectivity then your hub acts like a firewall and segregates IP traffic from IoT traffic. One of the major features, arguably the feature of Matter is that it acts as a transparent bridge between IoT devices and traditional IP networks like Ethernet and Wifi. Right now the attack surface of my IoT devices is limited to the attack surface of Home Assistant. With Matter every single IoT device is now exposed on the LAN massively increasing the possible attack surface.
I think it will be okay for smaller manufacturers, right now they have to spend resources on supporting multiple major smart home platforms so Matter will make their lives a bit easier.
Matter makes sense on paper but it's not really doing anything more than a standardized interface for MQTT traffic could do and damn Google has a way of fucking up simple stuff. Take a look at their repo for matter. Monolith of submodules and a goofy recursive project structure that requires multiple python virtual environments and external tools to build -- to the point where they have another repo just to distribute binaries of the build tools last known to work.
It's completely unnecessary and impossible to integrate cleanly into any existing system.