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.
Matter commands can be transmitted from one device to another using conventional Wi–Fi networks, Ethernet, or Bluetooth. There’s a problem here, though, as using Ethernet requires fixed, wired connections, which may not be convenient in many homes. Using Wi–Fi is more convenient and ideal for portable devices too, but does require quite a lot of power — and that causes problems for battery–powered devices, such as security cameras or sensors that need to be connected to your Wi–Fi network 24 hours a day for months at a time. Bluetooth is more power–efficient, but it has more limited range, so it’s not ideal for connecting several devices that may be scattered throughout different rooms within your home.