vignesh

If you think about smart-home gadgets at all, you probably think about energy-saving thermostats or lights you control with an app. Most people don’t worry about how they work, let alone how they might work together. Some of tech’s biggest players— Apple Inc., AAPL -2.66% Alphabet Inc. GOOG -2.86% ’s Google, Amazon. AMZN -2.52% com Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. —have established smart-home platforms, so your iPhone can turn off the lights or Alexa can change the thermostat without too much extra setup. But that still means shoppers must check if new products work with the tech they already have at home. Compatibility issues and setup complexity have made people slow to go all-in with smart-home technology. A new standard, called Matter, aims to change that. When it rolls out this year, Matter will act as a common language spoken by most new—and many older—smart-home products. You could buy any gadget you wanted and connect it to whichever app you prefer. You’ll be able to control it with the voice assistant of your choice, or even use multiple assistants and apps inside your home. Even though Matter would work behind the scenes, it could mean more affordable devices that are easier to set up and even play nicely together. What’s perhaps most surprising: All the biggest names in smart-home tech are on board, so going forward, you won’t be trapped in one walled garden. If you get tired of Alexa and want to switch to Apple’s HomePod Mini, you could do it without having to also buy new automated blinds. (It’s a little like the film industry going all-in on VHS back in the day.) “We all really recognized that unless we solved some foundational problems that were hitting all of us across the industry, this industry just wasn’t going to grow,” said Michele Turner, senior director of Google smart-home ecosystem. Along with the tech giants, over 220 other companies support Matter. Between now and the end of the decade, vendors will ship more than 5.5 billion Matter-compliant smart-home devices, according to ABI Research. Matter is designed to be more secure and private than other smart-home systems, in part because it can perform some basic functions without sending messages to the cloud. And you probably won’t have to throw out all your old smart devices. That’s not to say the companies supporting Matter won’t try to lock you in somehow. Matter defines basic functionality, but advanced features will still be linked to companies—like how AirPods work better with Apple devices. ‘So Dead Simple’ Initially, Matter will run in door locks; sensors for motion, air quality and more; thermostats; lighting; garage-door openers; blinds and shades; smart plugs; and smart TVs. More complex smart-home products, such as security cameras, robot vacuums and appliances, won’t be supported at launch. When a developer wants to add a feature to its smart-home product, it has to expend resources to update the software for every platform. With Matter, most changes would only need to be made once, so developers could lower their prices. Once you get your Matter-compatible product home, setup will be easy—you would just scan a QR code to add it to your network. “The goal is for the vast majority of devices out there—lights, plugs, switches, sensors—to make that initial setup so dead simple that it just takes a couple of seconds,” said Ms. Turner.