Several major smart home manufacturers, including Google, Apple, Samsung, and Wyze, hope to increase smart home cross-compatibility with an open-source standard called Matter. And now, Amazon reveals that all of its existing smart speakers, save for three early models, will support Matter at some point.
The new Matter protocol, which we expect to launch later this year, should eliminate the compatibility issues that make shopping for smart home products so confusing. Basically, if two products support Matter, then they will work together regardless of their brand.
While we don’t know exactly when Amazon will add Matter support to its Echo products, the company will probably start with its most popular smart speakers and Echo Show displays. Unfortunately, Amazon says that the 1st gen Echo, 1st gen Echo Dot, and Echo Tap will not gain Matter support.
Other Amazon smart products, like the Eero router, could also adopt Matter (though Amazon isn’t clear in this area). One thing that’s worth noting is that, unlike Google’s Nest speakers, Amazon Echo products cannot double as Matter hubs, as they do not support Thread. This probably isn’t a big deal if you have a lot of smart home products (there’s a good chance that one will double as a Matter hub), but it could complicate things for people with smaller Alexa-based setups.
Source: Amazon via The Verge