Illustration: The Verge
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.
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 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 a separate testing program for each platform to wear its “Works With” badge. If they get certified as a Matter Device by the CSA, they can show their results to the other ecosystems and get those badges, too, without doing any more testing. 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.