Bringing some order to the Internet of Things chaos

The Internet of Things is like the Island of Misfit Toys. It’s a chaotic, nightmare world of half-working gadgets.

Now, the people who sell you this junk know how poorly it works. Which is why they all got together (and I do mean, pretty well all of them) and last November came out with the “Matter” standard, which was supposed to make everything easy to install, to keep installed, and to interoperate between different apps and platforms.

And as regular readers of this column will know, Matter hasn’t been an improvement to date. In May, the staff here in the Labs did battle with some Matter light bulbs and light strips, and we suffered heavy casualties. If anything, it was a setback to the dismal state of home IoT that preceded it.

But now, we’ve been testing out a new Matter device from Aqara (a low-cost Chinese brand that’s proven to be the most reliable IoT brand we’ve tested, which isn’t saying much), and, well, there is real progress to report.

The device is a simple door and window sensor, that tells a home automation platform such as Apple Home or (our favourite) Home Assistant when a door or window has been opened or closed, so you can trigger some automation such as turning on lights.

Importantly, Aqara’s new sensor, known as the P2, uses Thread, a low-power, high-reliability wireless networking technology that goes hand-in-glove with the Matter system. Matter can use other wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee, but Thread is the way out of the trenches.

Mostly, the P2 has worked as promised.

We set up the sensor on four different Matter-enabled home-automation platforms – Google’s Home, Apple’s Home, Samsung’s SmartThings and the brilliant, free home automation platform Home Assistant – and the setup worked effortlessly every time.

The sensor comes with a Matter QR code, similar to the QR code on Apple Home devices, and on all four platforms we simply scanned in the code and the sensor installed effortlessly.

On Google Home, however, we couldn’t actually do anything with the P2 once it was installed, oddly enough. The sensor installed and showed up in the list of installed devices, and in the Google Home app we could see when doors opened and closed, but when we went to set up an automation that turned on lights whenever the P2 detected a door was opened, the P2 didn’t show up in the list of available sensors.

On the other three platforms, it not only installed, but worked, too. We easily created automations where lights came on the moment the P2 detected a door opening.

Another promise of Matter is that, once you’ve installed a Matter device like a sensor or a light bulb on one platform (or “fabric”, as Matter calls it), you should easily be able to share it with another platform, without reinstallation.

That partly worked for us, too. Installing the P2 on Samsung’s SmartThings automation system, we were able to share it with Google Home, where it worked every bit as well as if we had installed it directly on the platform. (That is, not at all!)

We couldn’t share an installation with Home Assistant due to some technical glitch we never got to the bottom of, and we couldn’t share it with Apple Home due to Apple not participating (as far as we can tell) in Matter’s multi-fabric system.

Almost a year into Matter, it’s clear that this technology does have the potential to fix the fiasco that IoT has become.

But another thing is clear, too. There will be no easy victory over the forces of chaos. This will be a war of attrition.

Likes: Installs easily, works reliably (so far). Uses the promising Matter over Thread system.
Dislikes: Matter still has some problems.
Price: Aqara Door & Window Sensor P2 $59. Needs a Matter platform and a Thread router.