How Matter works, where it’s headed, and why it matters

Happy holidays! ‘Tis the season for trimming trees, hanging lights, baking cookies… and spending two weeks at home trying to figure out why you can’t get the lights to automatically come on at night, and which of those stupid bulbs is causing all the rest to not work. Truly the most wonderful time of the year.

Every year on The Vergecast, we like to get into the holiday spirit by getting deep into the weeds on one of the most important specs, protocols, or systems that we all encounter every day. This year, for our annual Holiday Spec-tacular, we’re taking on everyone’s favorite kinda-sorta functional smart home protocol: Matter.

Matter is supposed to be the thing that makes the smart home work, that allows everything from your lights to your fridge to your vacuum cleaner to seamlessly connect. In reality, it is, well, not that. But it might be on its way! We begin the show with Nilay, David, and The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy talking about the state of Matter, and where the smart home has made strides — and made mistakes — this year. We also talk about Thread. A lot. More than we expected.

After that, the trio competes in a game to see who understands the complicated, overlapping jargon of the Matter universe best. (It’s a tight race, but the right person wins in the end.) And finally, Paulus Schoutsen, the creator of Home Assistant and president of the Open Home Foundation, joins the show to talk about what it’s like to work with Matter and whether we’re ever going to get the smart home of our dreams.

This is our last episode of the year — we’ll be back with a live episode at CES, and if you’re going to be in Vegas we hope you’ll come join us! In the meantime, have a wonderful holiday, and may all your smart lights always be the right color.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started: