Matter 1.0, or how the smart lock stopped choosing sides
In any hardware store in 2019, a smart lock display told the same story twice. The Yale Assure worked with Amazon Alexa. The Schlage Sense worked with Apple HomeKit. They were both cylindrical deadbolts with touchpads; neither would talk to the other’s ecosystem. You were buying a lock and a loyalty pledge at the same time, whether you knew it or not.
The people who built those locks knew the problem well. In December 2019, engineers and executives from Amazon, Apple, Google, and Samsung convened under a new working group inside the Zigbee Alliance, the standards body that had been maintaining one of those competing wireless protocols since 2002. They called the project Connected Home over IP, or CHIP. Their agreement was narrowly transactional: share a radio protocol, keep the ecosystems separate.
The Zigbee Alliance then did something nobody expected. In May 2021, it renamed itself the Connectivity Standards Alliance and rechristened the project Matter — and in doing so, the organization that had spent two decades stewarding a competing protocol became the institution responsible for making itself optional. It took three more years of working groups, two missed launch targets, and 280 member companies before the CSA published Matter 1.0 on October 4, 2022.
For a door lock, the practical effect was specific: a device certified for Matter works with Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings without adapters, bridges, or choosing sides. Yale’s Assure Lock 2, announced the week before Matter 1.0 shipped and priced between $160 and $260, could be unlocked by asking Siri or by asking Alexa or by asking the Google Assistant — whichever happened to be in the room. The lock received a single attestation certificate at manufacture and was, thereafter, indifferent to the branding on the speaker.
Matter runs primarily over Thread, a low-power IPv6 mesh network, with Bluetooth Low Energy handling the initial pairing ceremony. The IPv6 choice was deliberate: every Matter device gets a real local address, making it visible to the home network rather than to the manufacturer’s distant server. If the internet fails, a Matter lock still unlocks. That had not been true of every connected lock that came before.
Matter 1.0 also formalized the commissioning handshake that earlier smart locks had left ad hoc. When you add a Matter device to a home, the device and the controller run a Password-Authenticated Session Establishment, then switch to certificate-based sessions for all subsequent traffic. The lock arrives from the factory with a device attestation certificate signed by the CSA and verified against a distributed ledger. Counterfeiting a Matter lock requires forging that chain — which is, in practice, the same argument the pin-tumbler lock made in 1865 against picks.
For six thousand years, a key fit one lock. For roughly a decade, a smart lock fit one ecosystem. Matter broke the second constraint without touching the first: the door still demands a credential, it simply stopped caring which platform issued it.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Matter (standard) — Project CHIP announcement December 2019, Zigbee Alliance history, IPv6 and Thread architecture, founding members and timeline.
- CSA, “Matter Arrives,” October 4, 2022 — official Matter 1.0 launch; device types at launch including door locks; 280 member companies; distributed ledger certification details.
- Yale Assure Lock 2 — 9to5Mac, September 2022 — Yale as one of the first Matter-compatible smart lock products; price range $160–$260; Matter module details.