Buying a smart home product today means checking which ecosystems it works with by looking for the little “Works with Apple Home” or “Works with Google” badge on the package. Matter was supposed to get rid of those because if a product works with Matter, it should work with all the big smart home platforms. That hasn’t happened yet, and now we have one more badge to look for: the Matter badge.
Apple, Google, and Samsung will accept Matter certification of smart home products
This isn’t the end of all the ‘Works With’ badges, but it’s the beginning of the end.
This isn’t the end of all the ‘Works With’ badges, but it’s the beginning of the end.
Illustration: The Verge
is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
Getting all those badges is about to get simpler for manufacturers, though. The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), which runs Matter, announced today that Apple, Google, and Samsung will all accept its certification and testing results for their “Works With” programs:
The Alliance is excited to share that Apple has begun accepting Alliance Interop Lab test results for Matter devices for Works With Apple Home, and that Google and Samsung will be doing the same for their respective Works With Google Home, and Works With SmartThings certifications later this year, underscoring the credibility and reliability of the Alliance’s testing programs.
This means device makers won’t have to put their gadgets through the separate testing programs of each platform to wear its “Works With” badge. Instead, once certified as a Matter Device, the CSA’s Interop Lab can test and validate it for the participating Works With programs. The manufacturer can then show those results to the other ecosystems and get those badges, too. This makes it much easier for device makers and gets us one step closer to just one badge to rule them all. (Notably, Amazon has not announced participation for Works with Alexa.)
The CSA also announced a new FastTrack Recertification Program and a Portfolio Certification Program that lets companies certify multiple products more efficiently. A complaint I’ve heard frequently from smart home companies is that getting devices certified and recertified by Matter when they make a change or an update is a laborious and expensive process that slows down their development work. The CSA says these two new programs simplify both processes and make them less costly and complicated.
Correction, January 9th: An earlier version of this article did not specify that a device needs to be tested in the CSA’s Interoperability Lab after gaining certification to apply for Works With badge validation.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
