Matter is no longer a brand-new standard, but it’s still an emerging one. Matter is changing month-by-month, altering what’s possible within our smart homes in the process. Here are changes we are seeing right before our eyes in 2025.
The rise of new hubs
In Matter terms, a hub is known as a Matter controller. It’s a device used to control your other Matter devices. My current Matter hub is the Samsung Frame TV mounted on my wall, which controls my devices using SmartThings. There are four different ways I control Matter devices that all pass through my SmartThings hub.
For a while now, hubs have been associated with a specific ecosystem, typically tied to a tech giant. There’s Apple Home, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa. You see their badges plastered on the sides of boxes when a product has been specifically designed to work with that ecosystem.
Those aren’t the only names in town anymore. I can connect products like my Govee Floor Lamp to any hub capable of controlling Matter devices. That means I can use my TP-Link Deco router as the center of my smart home, since it functions as a Matter Controller.
Likewise, I could buy a hub from Ikea or Aqara and still expect them to be able to manage the Tapo light switches I’ve installed throughout my home. The number of available Matter Controllers is only expected to grow.
More interoperability, less exclusivity
While there remain some advantages to explicitly integrating a product with an ecosystem like Amazon Alexa, fewer devices now throw all of their chips in one basket. By embracing Matter, companies grow the size of their market. Devices that once might not have been available in Apple’s platform now often are. Likewise, I’ve been able to rely on SmartThings even though fewer smart home products explicitly list themselves as compatible with Samsung’s platform.
When new smart home gadgets go on sale, I’m now reasonably confident I can use at least some of their features without needing to switch my entire smart home ecosystem.
Bridges for everything
The wireless protocol your chosen device uses no longer matters as much as it once did. Philips Hue lights use Zigbee, but you can still tie them into any smart home platform because the required hub also doubles as a bridge that converts the signal to Wi-Fi.
Philips Hue Bridge
The Philips Hue Bridge, a gateway device by Signify, uses Zigbee for instant light response and enables Matter, a universal smart home standard, allowing seamless integration with other smart home brands and ensuring your lighting and accessories are always connected, even when Wi-Fi is down.
The same story is true of the SwitchBot hubs in my home, which makes non-Matter devices like my SwitchBot Meter Plus visible alongside my native Matter devices. The SwitchBot Hub 3 even goes so far as to connect to any IR device. It’s getting increasingly easy to make devices that once existed on their own distant islands, controllable from one place.
If your smart home consists of products you've bought from IKEA over the years, you can get the IKEA DIRIGERA bridge to bring these over to Matter, just like the SwitchBot hub The rise of bridges reduces lock-in and saves us from having to swap out entire product lines as we upgrade our home.
DIRIGERA
A Matter-compatible smart hub that connects and automates IKEA smart devices, enabling flexible control through the IKEA Home smart app, voice assistants, and remote triggers.
Greater privacy
To an extent, building a smart home has been synonymous with filling your house with internet-connected products that rely on cloud-based apps. You couldn’t use them without creating an account, and they became bricks once the manufacturer moved on.
Sadly, too many Matter products still depend on an app, but this is gradually changing. I chose my Tapo light switches and Govee floor lamps because I could set up both without needing to open a new account and provide yet another company with insights into my behavior. I can scan the QR codes they come with each product and add them to my hub, where they are controlled over my local network.
You can even isolate Matter devices from the internet, and they will continue to work as long as your Matter controller isn’t reliant on the internet to function (SmartThings is, whereas Apple Home isn’t). As gadgets become more Matter compatible, they will also gradually become more private as a result.
These tends aren’t limited to 2025
These tends are part of Matter’s core promise, and we can expect them to continue on into 2026 and 2027 as Matter continues to mature.
Looking ahead to next year, hopefully Matter will start to have fewer growing pains, with predictable levels of support for Matter devices across the various ecosystems. Companies like Google, Apple, Samsung, and TP-Link all support varying versions of Matter, meaning there’s guesswork involved in knowing which will work with a thermostat and which are limited to basics like lights and fans. In this regard, 2025 still remains a bit of a wild west.
