MATTER AND THREAD
Matter is a communications protocol enabling a variety of smart home devices to talk to each other. At the moment, Apple uses HomeKit as its communication standard for smart devices, while Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home use their own technologies. Having to support three different technologies makes life very difficult for the manufacturers of smart devices — which is one reason why so few manufacturers support HomeKit. So, in the future, Matter will provide one single communications technology that allows all sorts of smart devices to work with Siri and the Home app on Apple devices, but also with billions of other devices that use Amazon Alexa or Google Home.