The smart home industry is moving from “ecological fragmentation” to the “unification launch” stage, but this is not a simple benefit, but a deep restructuring of the pattern – old rules are being broken and new barriers are being formed.
It has been nearly four years since the birth of the Matter standard, and it has been stuck in the embarrassing state of “theoretically feasible but not practical”.
The global smart home market has exceeded US$150 billion in 2025, but due to multi-protocol fragmentation, the annual growth rate has been stuck at 10%–15% for a long time.
This number itself is an abnormal signal: the cake is getting bigger, but the efficiency of cutting the cake has not kept up.
Now the most critical indicator on the test sheet has changed.
Apple and Google will simultaneously complete the Thread 1.4 protocol upgrade of their devices in June 2026. Cross-brand border routers can be automatically merged into a unified Mesh network. The online availability of Matter devices has increased from 90% to nearly 99.9%, and the cross-ecological local linkage delay is controlled at the hundred millisecond level.
This is not a technical patch, but a threshold – it changes Matter from “demo level” to “consumer level”.
The data doesn’t lie: The agency predicts that after the implementation of Thread 1.4, the industry’s annual growth rate will increase to more than 20%, and the penetration rate of whole-house intelligence is expected to double in 3 to 5 years.
Short flowering is almost certain.
Why has Matter been idle for four years?
The external reasons are clear: before Thread 1.4, there was no unified credential sharing specification for border routers of different brands. Apple, Google, and Amazon fought independently. Multiple gateways in users’ homes were isolated from each other, which created more blind spots.
It’s like building a highway but setting up independent toll booths at each intersection – consumers can’t drive through it.
But the more core cause is internal – the game of interests.
Traditional home appliance manufacturers (such as Philips) have a cold attitude towards Matter. The core reason is not technical obstacles, but adapting to Matter means giving up the closed ecological barriers they have built for many years.
Once users can freely link across brands, manufacturers will lose their monopoly on user control.
This internal reason explains why the protocol specification was released as early as 2024, but was not actually activated until 2026 – because the driving force did not come from the consensus of the entire industry, but from the initiative of Apple and Google.
Apple and Google chose not to wait for their friends, but to upgrade all their devices to Thread border routers.
Apple TV, Google TV Streamer, iPhone, and Android phones—these existing devices directly constitute the local Thread network of hundreds of millions of users.
This specimen action reveals the pathology of the industry: when the interoperability of the protocol layer is actively activated by giants, ecological competition shifts from “closed hardware” to the competition for “entry control rights.”
From the perspective of Apple and Google, this is wise: iOS users naturally use Apple Home, and Android users use Google Home. In this way, the two major platforms have locked the core entrance to the Matter ecosystem.
Traditional home appliance manufacturers are facing a dilemma at this moment – if they do not connect to Matter, their products will be eliminated by the mainstream ecosystem; if they connect to Matter, they will be completely reduced to hardware suppliers and lose the ability to operate users.
Manufacturers such as Philips, Gree, and Haier have urgently shifted from “whether to adapt” to “how to adapt quickly”, which is a direct reflection of this structural pressure.
This is a phased benefit for users and small and medium-sized IoT manufacturers.
Consumers can finally purchase devices based on the functionality and cost-effectiveness of the product itself, without having to pay a premium for ecological binding (for example, Govee TV backlights can be connected to Apple Home without a dedicated bridge, and the price is much lower than products exclusive to the same ecosystem).
The R&D and certification costs of small and medium-sized manufacturers have been greatly reduced, all mainstream platforms can be reached with one-time adaptation, and the market entry threshold has been significantly reduced.
For traditional home appliance manufacturers that rely on a closed ecology, this is the beginning of a structural decline.
They have lost their monopoly on user control and are forced to directly compete with all brands for product strength at the hardware level – and in terms of cost performance and intelligence speed, they may not have an advantage over vertical IoT players.
Brands that do not have access to core control will find it increasingly difficult to break away from the bipolar ecosystems of Apple and Google.
But the industry has not moved towards absolute unification.
New hidden barriers are already forming: Apple and Google will retain high-end AI functions (such as person recognition, complex linkage rules) as exclusive value-added, and only basic controls can be used for cross-platform access; through network scheduling priorities, the response speed of devices in their own ecosystem will be significantly better than those in rival ecosystems.
The final layout is similar to today’s Android + iOS – basic capabilities are common and advanced experiences are layered.
One shortcoming worth being wary of is that the cross-ecological after-sales responsibilities and data privacy protection rules are currently completely blank.
When an Apple ecosystem sensor triggers a Google ecosystem light and causes a malfunction, is the platform or the hardware manufacturer responsible?
It is more difficult for consumers to safeguard their rights than in a single brand ecosystem.
So, what does Matter’s landing mean?
It is not the utopian “one App that controls the whole family”, but the smart home industry has officially entered a new stage of “basic interoperability + entrance game”.
The old era is over, but a new war has begun.
