An overview of the adoption of Matter, the new open-source smart home interoperability standard, across the devices and controllers on display at CES 2023
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge : Tweets: @jp2e Tweets: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / @jp2e : With dozens of new product announcements and plenty of support from all the smart home companies, Matter had a moment at CES. So, what's next? https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Matter arrived at CES 2023 as a story two years in the making: an industry-backed standard promising to fix smart home fragmentation that drew roughly thirty showcasing companies at CES 2022, then hit its official milestone when the Connectivity Standards Alliance launched Matter 1.0 and its certification program in October. A month later, hands-on testing showed real gaps between the promise and shipped products.
CES 2023 is the first major show since that launch, so the dozens of Matter-compatible device and controller announcements on display are the first broad read on whether vendors are actually certifying products rather than just pledging support.
First-order effects
- Device makers announcing Matter compatibility at CES can now sell into all four major controller ecosystems — Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung — instead of choosing sides per product line.
- Controller owners get immediate catalog expansion: every certified third-party device announced at the show works with their platforms without individual partnership deals.
Second-order effects
- Vendors who skipped certification face a shelf-presence problem, since retailers and reviewers can now treat non-Matter smart home gear as the fragmented option by default.
- The CSA's certification program becomes a commercial gatekeeper, giving it pricing and timeline leverage over every smart home vendor's launch schedule.
Third-order effects
- If adoption holds, competitive value migrates from walled-garden ecosystems to individual devices and the controllers' multi-admin experiences — but the later spec releases (Matter 1.3's appliance and energy management additions, then 1.4's enhanced multi-admin) show the standard still needs rapid iteration to close the gap between promise and delivery.
The trend: The smart home is consolidating around one open interoperability standard, with the CSA's spec-update cadence — not any single platform owner — setting how fast that consolidation actually happens.