Smart home ‘skeleton key’ Matter delayed until 2022

Smart home unification — or at least the promise of it — is going to have to wait. The Connectivity Standards Alliance (née Zigbee Alliance) said in a blog post on Friday that the forthcoming Matter standard, formerly known as Project CHIP, won’t be ready until at least 2022 — it was originally slated to debut this fall.

The delay is in the release of the Matter SDK or software development kit, which is the set of software tools and programs developers use to create specific applications. In the case of the Matter standard, that would include mobile apps that let users control smart home devices like smart light bulbs, outlets and doorbell camera.

Matter could potentially allow devices from competing manufactures like Apple, Google and Amazon to more easily communicate with each other, as well as save consumers the frustration of figuring out if a particular smart home device is compatible with their ecosystem of choice, whether Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa.