Matter promised one app for every smart home, but only Home Assistant actually delivered it for me

Published Nov 12, 2026, 8:01 AM EST Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek, Joe has been writing about technology since starting his career in 2018 at KnowTechie. He's covered everything from Apple to apps and crowdfunding and loves getting to the bottom of complicated topics. In that time, he's also written for SlashGear and numerous corporate clients before finding his home at XDA in the spring of 2023. He was the kid who took apart every toy to see how it worked, even if it didn't exactly go back together afterward. That's given him a solid background for explaining how complex systems work together, and he promises he's gotten better at the putting things back together stage since then. When Matter launched in 2022, the pitch I heard was simple: buy anything with the logo and run it all from whichever app you already use. I bought in, mostly because my phone's smart home folder was a graveyard of manufacturer apps I opened twice a year. Four years on, the logo part works, and I can pair a Matter-over-Thread device with almost anything I own. The one-app part hasn't worked out that way. Apple Home, Google Home, and Alexa each show a different slice of what my devices can do, and the rest still hides in the vendor's app. The only place I've found the whole picture is Home Assistant, running on a Proxmox box in my office, and it took a single smart plug to prove it. article Matter's one-app promise broke at the platform, not the standard Every ecosystem supports a different slice of the same spec The standard itself has done its job. Matter 1.0 covered lights, plugs, locks, and thermostats in October 2022; version 1.2 added robot vacuums and big appliances a year later; version 1.3 brought energy reporting in May 2024; and version 1.5 added cameras in November 2025. On paper, that's most of a house, even if it was built slowly. The catch is that nothing obliges a platform to support each device type, or to do it on any schedule. Google's supported-device list still has no water leak detectors, and it doesn't list the button-style generic switch from the very first release either. Amazon's Alexa list includes buttons and leak detectors now, but nothing for energy measurement. Cameras are the clearest example, because Samsung SmartThings turned them on in December 2025, and neither list includes them nearly a year later. To be fair, the Connectivity Standards Alliance promised that devices would work with every ecosystem, not that every ecosystem's app would be any good. But the logo says it works with everything, and most of us heard "so I only need one app." The manufacturer's app never actually went away Even when a platform supports a device type, it decides how much of the device to show you. One write-up of an Aqara U400 lock found Apple Home exposing a handful of settings while everything else stayed in Aqara's app. I didn't have to go looking for my own example, because it was already plugged into my test bench. One Eve Energy plug showed me how much Apple Home leaves out Home Assistant shows me so many more controls I was sure this plug was still connected to Apple Home via HomeKit. It shipped as a HomeKit device, and nothing in the Home app ever told me that changed. Home Assistant's device page did, by listing every controller paired to it over Matter: Apple Home, Apple Keychain, and Home Assistant. Two of those three are Apple's, because the Home app and iCloud Keychain each hold a pairing. Apple keeps its own list in iOS Settings, which shows two of the three, while Home Assistant shows every controller on the device page. Here's what Apple Home on iOS 27 gives me for the plug: an on/off toggle, the wattage it's drawing right now, the option to group it with other accessories, a button to add an automation, the Matter pairing code, and the usual model and firmware details. That's the lot on the plug's page. Home Assistant, talking to the same plug over the same protocol, exposes 17 entities. Some of these are essentials, like power-on behavior. It's nowhere in Apple Home, and I couldn't find it in the Eve app either. Home Assistant not only shows it but lets me specify what will happen. The wattage is the other interesting row, because it took the scenic route. Home Assistant was reading this model's energy data back in 2023, when the only other place to see it was Eve's own app. Matter made energy reporting standard in May 2024, Eve moved the plug over to it in April 2025, and Apple Home started showing the number with iOS 27 this September. That's roughly 17 months when Eve's firmware offered standard, certified energy data and Apple's app simply didn't display it. And when it did arrive, the plug's page got one live number, while the history hides behind a main-screen Energy button that usually shows a clean energy forecast. Home won't even offer it as an automation trigger, so I can look at the wattage, but I can't act on it. Home Assistant treats the same reading as any other sensor, so it can start one. Firmware is where the vendor app annoys me most The Eve app is where I have to go for the child lock, and I don't enjoy the trip. It feels designed by an engineer, with settings that only appear when the app decides I need them. Firmware is the worst offender, because the update row only shows up when there's an update, and there's no way to ask it to check. Home Assistant just leaves the answer on the device page. Installed version 3.5.0, latest version 3.5.0, and its Matter documentation says it checks for new firmware every 12 hours. I haven't seen it install anything, though, because it doesn't see a newer build for this plug. And yes, I know "designed by an engineer" is also the oldest complaint about Home Assistant. Both apps are dense. Only one of them is dense about my whole house instead of one brand's plugs. And the Home Assistant redesign makes it much easier to use, so the complaint is fading. Home Assistant also has to run everything Matter left out My Sonos soundbar, Roborock vacuums, and air monitors belong on the same dashboard Only three devices in my Home Assistant install speak Matter: the Eve plug, plus an ESP32-C6 Matter button and a test leak sensor I built for earlier pieces. Everything else comes through its own integration, including a Sonos Arc, two Roborock vacuums, three Airthings devices, the office TV, and my printer. Some of those categories aren't waiting on a firmware update, either. Matter has a basic speaker type but nothing for grouping speakers the way Sonos does; alarm systems aren't in the spec yet, and the clever parts of a camera still live with whoever made it. An app that stops at the Matter logo was never going to be the one app. Home Assistant doesn't care how a device got there. The plug, the soundbar, and the vacuum all end up as entities I can put on one dashboard and use in one automation. That's the promise I thought I was buying in 2022, and it turns out the protocol was only half of it. Home Assistant isn't the easy answer, and SmartThings comes close The setup process was long and it needed more hardware I won't pretend this is the consumer-friendly option. My one app is a virtual machine on a Proxmox host with a UPS behind it, and the Thread side leans on an Apple TV 4K I already owned, because Home Assistant can borrow Apple's border routers without joining Apple's ecosystem. That's a lot of hardware standing behind the word "app." It hasn't been flawless either. The plug dropped offline eight times one night last week, although that was a power outage plus me poking at my DNS settings, so I did it to myself (mostly). My third-gen Nest Learning Thermostat never got Matter, so the only way back in after I rebuilt Home Assistant is Google's cloud integration, which wants a Google Cloud project, OAuth credentials, and a $5 fee. Matter cameras also only reached Home Assistant this month, nearly a year after SmartThings. SmartThings deserves the credit there. It was first with Matter cameras, and if you live in Samsung's world, it's the closest consumer answer. But the spec version never mattered to me. What matters is how much of each device the app shows and whether it also runs the gear Matter ignores, and that's where Home Assistant pulls ahead. It's not a hobby project anymore, either. Home Assistant and its Matter Server were certified by the Connectivity Standards Alliance in 2025, the Open Home Foundation counts more than two million active installations, and a Home Assistant Green gets you there without a home lab, though Thread devices like my plug still need a border router. Matter gave me the devices, and Home Assistant gave me the app I'd still tell anyone to buy Matter gear. The standard is the reason one plug can sit in Apple Home and Home Assistant at the same time. Thread 1.4 is starting to arrive on Apple, Google, and SmartThings hardware, and Matter 1.6's Joint Fabric aims to solve the remaining sharing problems, though I haven't seen a big platform ship it yet. The controller is the deciding factor in whether your app can see the devices or not, and the one Home Assistant ships with has the most compatibility so far.