Fabio ManganielloI've waited a couple of years to see how things went with <a class="hashtag" href="https://manganiello.social/tag/matter" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Matter</a> and Thread, I didn't build any integration in Platypush yet (unlike HASS, which quickly jumped onboard), as I was waiting for the new "standard" to prove its point.<br><br>I thought that Matter was nothing but a big unnecessarily Wi-Fi based mess, that it wouldn't have been a viable option for tons of <a class="hashtag" href="https://manganiello.social/tag/iot" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#IoT</a> devices that couldn't use Wi-Fi (either because of reliability or power issues), let alone become the de facto standard for the industry, that its specifications were messy and unnecessarily complex, that its development burden was unjustifiably high, that it would have required anyway proprietary apps distributed by the hardware maker to operate for any non-trivial use-cases, that it didn't even try to solve the mesh problem like Zigbee has done, and I knew that I shouldn't trust any "open" protocols coming out of committees mostly led by Google and Samsung.<br><br>A couple of years down the line, and a year after its first stable release, Matter is just an N+1 standard in a world that proliferates with competing standards. Very few products are fully compatible with it, many announced that they would have worked on Matter compatibility and then put their projects on a back burner, and it seems that the two protocols it was supposed to replace (#Zigbee and <a class="hashtag" href="https://manganiello.social/tag/zwave" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ZWave</a>) are actually doing just fine.<br><br>This is, indeed, what I never understood about Matter. We *already* have open protocols for IoT. Ikea lights and other obscure brands can already work with a Hue bridge without having to get any Matter certification. You can already buy a Zigbee USB dongle, flash it with zigbee2mqtt firmware, and you have access to hundreds of devices and brands out of the box. And on the Z-Wave front things are even better, thanks to a general-purpose protocol and data model that was even better designed than Zigbee and makes inter-compatibility a breeze.<br><br>Did we really need a new addition to the family? Did we really need to ask stretched developers like me to build yet one more integration in our frameworks because "trust me bro, this time this is really going to be the standard that rules them all"?<br><br>I'm happy that even the folks at Ars Technica acknowledge the same problem and have reached the same conclusions as mine.<br><br><a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/i-was-wrong-to-ignore-zigbee-and-z-wave-theyre-the-best-part-of-my-smart-home/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/i-was-wrong-to-ignore-zigbee-and-z-wave-theyre-the-best-part-of-my-smart-home/</a>