- Home Assistant is now part of the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit aiming to fight against surveillance capitalism and offer privacy, choice, and sustainability.
- The foundation will own and govern all Home Assistant entities, including the cloud, and has plans for new hardware and AI integration.
- Home Assistant aims to become a mainstream smart home option with a focus on privacy and user control, while also expanding partnerships and certifications.
By any chance are you using Matter in your home? If so, does HA handle that well?
Matter very much seems to be the “there are 14 competing standards” joke personified.
Matter’s biggest problem is that it launched behind everything else. You’re already starting to see a lot of support for it just because it allows companies to support Apple Home without implementing the whole HomeKit stack & pay the licensing fees to Apple. SwitchBot, Hue and IKEA already have Matter support in their hubs in beta.
But it won’t be relevant to non-Apple users until Thread radios start being more pervasive and the spec reaches v2 and supports more stuff. Then most devices will be Matter, because a company can support all 3 major vendor apps with one standard. Right now it’s:
- Amazon/Google - most low end devices or devices made by those companies
- Apple Home - devices specifically for homekit
- Amazon/Google/Apple Home - devices for all 3
- Amazon/Google/Matter - devices for all 3 that use Matter to support Apple Home
Some will still go those routes, but eventually it will just make sense to support Matter and do away with all of those separate devices and support paths.
I think the analogy is faulty because none of what exists is any sort of standard. It’s just a bunch of proprietary vendor implementations. Matter is the first front end Smart Home standard.
Matter doesn’t yet matter, but HA really Matters
One of the great features about HA is the flexibility to handle just about anything. I really don’t have any Matter devices, except Apple specific, but those are very gradually appearing. I have both Zigbee and z-wave meshes for local control, but can easily add a Thread radio (or my Zigbee one can supposedly be re-flashed). The foundations are mostly there, the flexibility and integrations are there: we just need the standard to mature and the devices to appear, but HA is a great start
