The Connectivity Standards Alliance spent 2025 adding device types to Matter, but the question for 2026 is less about what the spec covers and more about whether the products actually work together once they leave the lab.
Matter is the IP-based connectivity protocol that the alliance has promoted since 2022 as the fix for a fragmented smart home market. By the end of 2025, the number of committed manufacturers had grown, professional suppliers like Busch-Jaeger (ABB), Maco, and Warema had joined, and Ikea had pushed Matter-certified products below the ten-dollar mark. Cameras arrived in Matter 1.5, filling a gap that had lingered for years.
The nut graf: the protocol is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the gap between what the spec promises and what a buyer gets when mixing brands. Thread mesh networks still compete with each other, battery life on sensors lags behind Zigbee, and the two biggest platforms, Apple Home and Google Home, behave differently enough that a device certified under the same version can feel like two different products. That gap is where this story lives, and it is where most of the money and frustration in smart home IoT now concentrates.
Thread Is Finally Getting the Product Range It Needed
Thread is one of three connectivity technologies inside Matter, alongside Wi-Fi and Ethernet. It has been criticized for competing mesh networks, short battery life, and a shrinking product selection after manufacturers like Nanoleaf withdrew. Progress in all three areas is real, but uneven.
The clearest signal comes from Ikea. The company launched a Thread offensive of more than 20 new products in 2025, expanding the installed base at the low end of the market. Aqara, Bosch, Home Assistant, Level, Meross, Philips Hue, Yale, and others also brought new Thread products to market. In the professional segment, ABB, Maco, and Warema joined, and Samsung quietly equipped a growing number of its devices with a Thread Border Router.
Frank-Oliver Grün, writing in a January 3 status review on matter-smarthome.de, noted that further announcements were expected at CES in January 2026 and at the Light + Building trade fair in March 2026. The product count is no longer the problem. The problem is that a Thread network from one brand still does not always hand off cleanly to another.
Battery Life: Better, but Not Yet Zigbee
Battery-powered devices benefit most from recent spec work. Matter 1.4 introduced improvements in the power consumption of sleeping devices, meaning sensors or wireless buttons that are inactive check in less frequently without losing their status on the network. Products certified under version 1.4 are now gradually reaching the market.
The stated goal is to match the energy efficiency of the best Zigbee counterparts. Zigbee has an advantage because it has been optimized for low-power operation for more than a decade. Thread is catching up, but a motion sensor that needs new batteries every four months is not a selling point, and that is still a common complaint in user forums.
It is not clear this will hold. Certification under Matter 1.4 does not guarantee a manufacturer implemented the sleep optimizations well, and the alliance has no public test for real-world battery life. Buyers are left to trust brand claims.
The Real Friction Is Between Ecosystems, Not Protocols
Matter was supposed to end the era of choosing a platform. In practice, the two largest platforms, Apple Home and Google Home, interpret the same spec differently. A device certified under Matter 1.4 can expose features to one platform that the other does not surface, and automations built in one ecosystem rarely port to another.
The connectivity problem has been solved at the radio layer. The application problem has not. A smart lock that works flawlessly with Apple Home but drops automations when paired to Google Home is not a connectivity failure. It is a product failure that the spec does not prevent.
This is the part of the market where money actually moves. Consumers do not buy protocols. They buy a lock that unlocks when they walk up to the door, and they return it when it does not.
What 2026 Looks Like
The alliance has signaled that Matter 1.5 and beyond will keep adding device categories, with cameras now covered and more professional-grade hardware on the way. Ikea's sub-ten-dollar Thread products will pull the installed base upward, and Samsung's quiet Thread Border Router rollout will make networks more reliable without buyers noticing.
The open question is whether the platforms will converge on behavior, not just connectivity. Until Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung agree on how a certified device should actually behave in a home, Matter will remain a promise that works best inside a single brand's ecosystem.
For buyers, the practical advice is unchanged. Pick a platform first, buy Thread-certified devices where possible, and treat cross-platform claims with skepticism. For manufacturers, the work in 2026 is not adding features. It is making the features they already have behave the same way everywhere.
The next checkpoint is CES in January 2026, where manufacturers are expected to announce new Thread products. Whether those announcements translate into devices that work the same way on every platform is the number that actually matters.
There is also a quieter cost to the platform gap. Support teams at device makers report that a large share of returned smart home products are not defective. They are misconfigured, or they fail because the buyer's platform did not expose a feature the spec requires. Return rates in the category run higher than in comparable consumer electronics, and the IoT industry has been slow to publish those figures. When they do, the number will likely show that interoperability failures, not hardware faults, drive most of the waste.
Industrial IoT is watching this from the sidelines. Factories and logistics operators have their own protocol wars, but they solve them with gateways and middleware budgets that home buyers do not have. The consumer market cannot afford that approach. If Matter does not close the behavior gap, the consumer side of IoT will keep growing in unit count while shrinking in trust, and 21.1 billion connected devices globally, per IoT Analytics, will not translate into 21.1 billion satisfied users.
The installed base keeps climbing. IoT Analytics estimated 21.1 billion connected devices in 2025 with a compound annual growth rate of 13.2 percent toward 39 billion by 2030. Growth at that pace hides a quality problem. Every new device that ships with a half-working integration adds to the pile of products that get unplugged and forgotten in a drawer.
That is the stakes for 2026. Not whether Matter reaches more device types, but whether the devices already certified under it behave like products instead of experiments. The alliance has the spec. The manufacturers have the hardware. The platforms have the users. What is missing is the shared agreement on what a certified device is supposed to do when a person walks into a room and expects the lights to respond.
For background on the protocol, see the Connectivity Standards Alliance page.
Related coverage: IoT category
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