Yes, I followed that drama as well and the did eventually make the newer firmware available to HA and similar though that doesn't exactly negate anything I said. For new features/fixes you are dependent on the manufacturer but that's the same everywhere. The big difference is that if Linus' switch company went out of business then his switches would continue to work the same way they always did (bugs and all). But I do agree with you Z-wave isn't perfect and does sometimes require a little more knowledge to work with.
Thankfully I'm all set currently (aside from the SmartThings rug-pull that I have to deal with and finally move everything remaining to HA instead of using my ST hub as just a controller from HA) and I'm just going to sit tight over the next few years and see how things shake out before I upgrade/replace any of my gear.
> As it stands now I don't care at all who made my Z-wave switches/bulbs/plugs, they could already be out of business for all I care
If the company was out of business and there was no way to get the newer firmware, LTT might have had issues. Also, buying a switch because it is advertised as having feature X, only to find out that feature X was added in a newer firmware than you have, and you can't get that firmware. That means it isn't just a "I dont care at all who made my product" scenario. It's much lower risk (especially if the feature you want is basic functionality rather than automation), but it's not 0 risk.
I agree with you that Z-wave is going to be 100% better than WiFi devices that call home and join a botnet, but I wanted to make sure it was clear that there is still room for issues.
It definitely confuses the user story though, idk why they included wifi at all.
> Wi-Fi enables Matter devices to interact over a high-bandwidth local network and allows smart home devices to communicate with the cloud.
If only there was a way to have it explicitly NOT communicate with the cloud. That's the last thing I want.
When operating via thread, those ipv6 packets are just using it as low powered wifi alternative for those packets. Both Wifi and Thread connections thus require two levels of joining. One for connection to the AP/thread mesh network, and one for the matter encrypted network. Ethernet based devices on the other hand, can simply join directly to the matter encrypted network.
BLE for joining can simplify this, as a controller can provide the needed info about thread or wifi, as well as the info needed to join the matter network.
----
Now I very much support local control. Most of my smart home devices right now are either Zigbee or Z-Wave. I have 9 z-wave devices (plus the home-assistant controller), and 4 Zigbee ones at the moment, although only 2 are in use. (These current ones will never upgeade to support matter over thread). I am waiting on he new inovelli switches which will initially run on zigbee, but I will probably later upgrade them to run on matter. (After I buy a new zigbee radio dongle that supports dual stack zigbee/thread operation, and home-assistant officially releases their support for doing that).
But those of us running home-assistant, or the like are not the real target market of Matter. For more typical users, they end up with a bunch of smart devices that are wither wifi based, or have their own hub. Each one has a seperate app. Some might be homekit compatible, some might be hue compatible (work via the hue hub and its app), some might be compatible with amazon Alexa via the cloud, some might work for Alexa via zigbee (but only if you have an echo model that supports zigbee). It is not easy for consumers to even be certain what works with what.
With Matter, every Matter device will be compatible with homekit, will be compatible with Alexa, will be compatible with google home, will be compatible with SmartThings. The only requirements are that your controller device have support for the general type of device in question, and if it is a Thread device you have at least one Thread "border router" (ip gateway, equivalent to wifi AP) in your matter network. Homepods for example include such a border router, and likely some future Amazon Echo models will too, and it has been suggested that some Wifi Routers will include that functionality too.
That is a huge win for the average consumer!
The one nice thing about it, above Zigbee, is that you can expect devices to work together. With Zigbee you frequently have to pair a device with a hub from the same manufacturer.
During my first attempt at home automation, I used to mess around with flashing custom firmware onto WiFi devices (Tasmota, ESPHome.) It was a huge pain whenever the hacking process stopped working (tuya-convert), and I had to open up the device, solder some wires, and flash the chip via USB serial.
Nowadays I can just buy any Zigbee product I want (usually from AliExpress), and get it set up in zigbee2mqtt without any extra steps. And it's all local within my home, and no hubs or cloud services required.
I think Zigbee is better for me because I have a lot of battery-powered devices, such as sensors for motion, door contacts, and temperature/humidity. I'm really impressed that the button batteries usually last for 1-2 years.
On the other hand, Zwave radio spectrum varies depending on region, so you need to be very careful that you don't spend hours troubleshooting something that doesn't work because it's a device intended for the EU market instead of US.
IIRC, Zigbee is better here.
I have a handful of Aqara sensors that constantly dropped away, so I just flashed an XBee with router firmware and have it on a small USB battery that stays plugged in. That way power outages won’t cause issues with the “leave and rejoin” request that routers will issue to aged-out devices, which my Aqara devices seem to balk at.
I had less luck finding Matter with DuckDuckGo. Evidently a competitive search term (which is to be expected).
As it stands I dont see this being a thing that benefits me. It is more likely that this pushes smart home manufacturers away from Zwave, and makes my life worse because now I can't buy IoT devices without granting them internet access. Then I have to go through and start setting up IoT VLANs to quarantine devices, and in some really shitty cases, Ive seen WiFi devices where the app sends a message to a server, and the server sends a message to the device... so I can't quarantine the device without modifying it or losing functionality (see MyQ garage door openers). The industry looks bleak.
Agree on all points of preferring Z-wave though and it's also what I use. However, Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) recently redid all the switches in his home with Zwave switches... and they had a firmware issue... And the company refused to publish firmware updates in any way except through "official" Zwave hubs, and not Home Assistant. It eventually got sorted out, but Zwave isn't necessarily intrinsically failproof either.