Firmware for Matter is going to be enormous, zwave is a lot simpler. Lots of pessimism in the market about the interoperability of Matter. No mfgr is going to be motivated to encourage their customers to interoperate with a competitors gadget. My prediction is everything will ship with a "matter" icon on it, but support will only be vertical silo, maybe even worse than things are now.
Thread is basically a full wifi-ish TCP/IPv6 stack, so, again, pretty huge compared to a tiny little zwave firmware.
Interesting angle to think about: Is the middle or end of a chip shortage the worst possible time to ship a HUGE new standard, or is it the best possible time because there's no stockpile of smaller memory smaller CPU legacy microcontrollers?
> My prediction is everything will ship with a "matter" icon on it, but support will only be vertical silo, maybe even worse than things are now.
There's already available evidence that contradicts that prediction. Eve[1] is rolling out a firmware update for Matter support that makes their devices usable across all Matter supported platforms. There are some features that aren't yet available at the Matter level so those will remain in their own app for now. Despite being iOS-only previously with Matter support they're now also reaching Android devices and are working on an Android app for it too to cover the missing features in Matter.
Agree with you, the first company to defect from interop will have a higher financial report then mgmt will demand engineering implement prevention-of-interop features or at least ignore the issue.
Yeah,it's going to be tough. However, the one good thing about Z-Wave (even relative to zigbee) is interoperability - devices pretty much work for the most part, even with generic drivers.
At some point there'll be a matter/thread bridge to z-wave.
The big question about matter/thread devices is cost.
The second is going to be security. If they're IPv6 then they're globally addressable, which is bad bad bad. How is that going to be mitigated? Is the hub going to be the router for those devices and block all incoming connections?
> If they're IPv6 then they're globally addressable, which is bad bad bad. How is that going to be mitigated?
I think you need to read up on IPv6 a bit. There are whole IPv6 ranges set aside that are not globally routable / part of the global unicast range[1].
Thread has link-local and mesh-local addresses. The global is only gained through SLAAC/DHCP or manual configuration by an administrator so by default no, your devices aren't accessible to the outside world. And if you do have routable IPv6 in your network, you should already have a firewall on your network edge for this because all your existing devices would already be exposed. The addressing primer[2] for Thread also applies to Matter for further details.
