In the Land of the Smart Home, One App to Rule Them… Almost

We recently had a Matter roundtable at Silicon Labs Works With 2024. It was a fantastic chance for ecosystems, device makers, development partners, and others to learn more about the current state of Matter, its challenges and limitations, what is being done to address its shortcomings, new device types coming in the future, and new markets or use cases that are being worked on.

The goal of the roundtable was to allow people to have a more open and honest conversation, so we did not stream or record the event as has been done in previous Works With events. This allowed for attendees to share their own experiences for bad or good, confusion with the goals of the standard, or just general concerns. It is never easy to hear this but is important to get the open feedback.

One of the pieces of confusion that we heard had to do with the need for multiple apps on your mobile device. Shouldn’t Matter mean I can get rid of all my other smart home apps? I never need to even download another smart home app again right? Well, almost.

Matter as a standard has done great things for providing a baseline of interoperability to greatly simplify the commissioning and standardize IP based IoT communications. This helps so many new and existing device makers avoid inventing ways of doing the same basic commissioning that Matter already provides. It doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement in the Matter device setup, but the goal is to ensure that proprietary improvements will be really innovative and not just mildly improved.

When it comes to smart home apps, I see them falling into three categories:

• Generalist smart home apps
• Device feature apps
• Services apps

Generalist Smart Home Apps

There is a lot of simple functionality that can be accessed via Matter, and that means users can do most all of it with just a single app. Matter already has support for most of the popular device types. Put more succinctly, I don’t need multiple lighting apps on my phone just because the smart bulbs happen to be from different manufacturers.

Apps that will handle most of the basic home automation, I call generalist smart home apps. These will handle associating devices with different rooms, scenes, routines, and labelling them to make logical sense with the way we naturally live in our smart homes. Users only need one of these generalist apps on their phone. However, it’s important that we allow users the option to switch between generalist smart home apps if they want. One of the goals of Matter is to avoid manufacturer lock-in by ensuring devices can be paired to multiple smart home apps simultaneously, even if the user will only use one.

From a developer perspective, creating your own mobile app is a high barrier to entry and could mean a sub-par experience for something basic. I recently bought a temperature sensor system that had a hub and a number of remote sensors so that I could monitor the temperature in remote locations in my house (the garage, the attic, and a couple of rooms where the thermostat wasn’t located). My goal was to get a better sense of the temperature swings during the cold winters and the warm summers here in the Boston area. These temperature sensors required me to download the mobile app, create an account on the manufacturer’s website, commission the hub, commission each sensor individually, label the sensors, and only then could I finally achieve what I wanted. Monitoring the system required me to re-launch the app regularly, which on occasion made me log back in just to see the temperature. The worst part is that this particular system had extremely poor range and I couldn’t find the right place to install the hub to make all the sensors happy. I eventually gave up and returned the system.

This entire experience has a lot of overhead just to get a temperature sensor up and running. This really shouldn’t be the case, for either a user or developer. It is easy to say that a temperature sensor doesn’t need its own Mobile App. This is an obvious case where a generalist smart home app could easily provide support for temperature sensors along with its other features and functionality. Apple, Google, Samsung, and Amazon all provide this kind of experience through their current hardware and software offering.

Smart Home Device Feature Apps

But now let’s take something more sophisticated like a robot vacuum. This is a more complex device type that can be setup with a schedule, maps of rooms, excluded vacuum areas, control for mopping vs vacuuming, sensors for indicating battery charge, the level of the vacuum bag, and more. Although Matter does have support for robot vacuums, you can easily see why you may want to have a device feature app on your phone for your a robot vacuum and its more complex management. Now certain simpler functionality could be handled, and I would argue should be handled, via a generalist smart home app means. Start, stop, or notifications could easily be handled by a generalist app. If your robot vacuum starts running while you are in the middle of having a kids party, you may want to very quickly use a voice assistant to tell the device to stop or delay its routine. Perhaps the device gets stuck, and you would like to see a notification pop up on a more convenient screen such as a Matter-enabled TV.

From a user perspective, it should be intuitive when you need a dedicated app.

From a developer perspective, Matter enables simpler device integrations but also provides flexibility for a more complex interface experience via a dedicated device feature app. Building a smart home mobile app is now a choice based on the user experience and the device capabilities, rather than just a necessity in all cases.

For some device classes, Matter will grow in its feature set and the major ecosystem will evolve to provide a “good enough” experience for your device that you can phase out your own specialized app. For smaller companies, this means they can focus on adding new hardware features rather than being required to hire mobile developers to re-create yet another a smart home mobile app.

Smart Home Device Services Apps

Now, for a users there will be situations where a generalist smart home app will be too simple in what it can do but where a device feature app will be too limiting. A device feature app is focused in its usage to interact with a single device or single device type. What a user may want is to integrate with a feature across multiple devices. This is where a services app comes in.

Take for example the case of energy management. Matter has enabled devices to report their energy usage and provide the means to aggregate that data in a single unified place. A services app can interact with multiple devices in the home all in support of tracking energy usage. An energy management app needs to understand big energy consumers, like thermostats connected to HVAC, laundry dryers, laundry washers, and a few other related devices like ceiling fans. It doesn’t need to know about lights or sensors or many other Matter enabled nodes that are just not relevant to that goal. It doesn’t need to provide home automation routines or integrate with a voice assistant. This app may have knowledge of your local utility’s cost for electricity or that you have solar panels on your roof, or a generator hooked up to the house. An energy management app may have dedicated screens showing your energy usage over time, correlating this to the past weather conditions. It could have various modes focused on how you can fine tune energy in your home or business to achieve lower costs or just going more green and comparing to your neighbor’s usage. This kind of app will need access to your Matter network but is not meant to be a substitute for the other kinds of apps, and in particular will not be a generalist app.

This kind of specialized service offering is common on the internet. Take for example Slack. Slack is still hugely important for business messaging. It integrates with a number of other tools to provide a means of getting updates and even interacting all within Slack as a means to provide a better user experience. However, it is not a substitute for those other tools. You can integrate Slack with Jira to get updates and perform some simple operations, but it doesn’t replace Jira. I foresee the same kind of thing will occur with user’s Smart Homes.

Smart Home App Conclusion

Ultimately it’s up to the user to decide how they want to manage their network. If they want only a single generalist smart home apps because their usage is simple enough that’s their choice. But if they need a bit more functionality there is option for a blend of smart home apps based on what they do or which one the user likes best.

Having the option for multiple apps is a good thing because it will allow companies to specialize and innovate, and of course compete. Device makers can focus on building the best-in-class device and how to highlight those unique elements that users desire. Services apps can build a service offering based around a theme or specialized use case without having to support all the Matter enabled device types. For all the typical automation use cases, you have the generalist apps.

To put it more succinctly, Chris La Pre Head of Technology at CSA had this great way to summarize it: “You’ll intuitively know when you need a separate app for your smart home device”.