HomeKit Insight

Warning for HomeKit users before updating to Matter

Rating: 0
Author: Jon Ratcliffe

December 12, 2022

Matter 1.0 was officially launched back in October and now firmware updates are arriving this month. But before you jump into the Matter hype train, I just wanted to offer some caution based on my experience of testing several matter devices over the last month.

But before you read on, you may need to understand the difference between Apple Home vs HomeKit framework

HomeKit is the framework that houses the unique features that we either love or hate. These features, like HomeKit adaptive lighting and HomeKit Secure Video, are unique to HomeKit.
Apple Home is the layer on top and is essentially the Home App. This is what we see as users for devices connected either via the HomeKit framework or Matter. Matter exposes devices to Apple Home with iOS, iPadOS and MacOS.

Some HomeKit only features not available via Matter

Two of the devices I have been testing have been from lighting manufacturers, with one of them that currently supports adaptive lighting via HomeKit. During my testing, I found this feature was not available when exposed via Matter and this is because Matter does not support HomeKit Adaptive Lighting.

You could lose the ability to add devices directly to HomeKit

When a device is updated to Matter, it can lose the ability to be added back to HomeKit directly. In the main, this is not an issue because Matter still exposes the device to Apple Home. So you can control the device via the Home App, setup automations and use Siri.

But because you cannot roll back to HomeKit only. Then you could lose the ability to use features like HomeKit adaptive lighting permanently or until Matter supports it.

Summary

I view Matter as a promising development for the smart home and I am very interested to see how it plays out. But for HomeKit/Apple Home it’s going to bring hopefully more choice of devices.

But before you jump into Matter with existing devices, understand the impact on your current setup before you update them to support Matter. ultimately if you are do not plan to use another ecosystem like Alexa or Google. Then its best to stick with the HomeKit firmware on the device and do not update.

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