Belkin pauses Matter support in smart home devices

AppleInsider

Belkin's smart home company Wemo is halting the development of devices with Matter to rethink its strategy.

Belkin pauses Matter rollout

Wemo makes various smart home accessories such as smart plugs, doorbells, and switches, but has decided to pause its Matter products. The company wants to first discover how to make its products stand out from competitors.

"Matter will have a significantly positive impact on the smart home industry," Jen Wei, Vice President of Global Communications and Corporate Development at Belkin, told The Verge. Wei continued by saying the company plans to "take a big step back, regroup, and rethink" its approach to the smart home.

While Wemo has products that use Thread, a wireless protocol that works with Matter for local control of smart home devices, they likely won't receive support for Matter, at least for now.

Matter is a standard backed by Apple and other companies that can improve the integration between smart home devices. It works alongside protocols such as HomeKit to let devices from different companies work together.

It removes some exclusivity in the smart home market since people aren't locked into one company's ecosystem. Wemo might be looking for ways to introduce features that help it stay competitive and differentiate itself.

But the company may reintroduce Matter into its products in the future. The protocol isn't going away, and potential customers might see the lack of Matter support as a reason to choose smart home devices from other companies.

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mknelson

That's a bit surprising.

Nanoleaf had to stop Matter development for their older lighting products as the spec had become so complicated there wasn't enough storage for Matter. They're having to release new models as a result. Maybe Belkin has hit a similar roadblock.

avon b7

mknelson said:

That's a bit surprising.

Nanoleaf had to stop Matter development for their older lighting products as the spec had become so complicated there wasn't enough storage for Matter. They're having to release new models as a result. Maybe Belkin has hit a similar roadblock.

Another major roadblock for smaller companies, (though not the likes of Belkin) might be the potentially high cost of certification, which I have been told can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

hammeroftruth

avon b7 said:

mknelson said:

That's a bit surprising.

Nanoleaf had to stop Matter development for their older lighting products as the spec had become so complicated there wasn't enough storage for Matter. They're having to release new models as a result. Maybe Belkin has hit a similar roadblock.

Another major roadblock for smaller companies, (though not the likes of Belkin) might be the potentially high cost of certification, which I have been told can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

I’m wondering why the cost is so high of certification and where does the money go?

I hope this doesn’t end up like IEEE-1394 for consumers.  Good technology, too expensive to implement. 

melgross

I’d like to see something other than heresay about the costs of certification, and if that high, why. It could be that each item needs certification, which is normal, look to UL certification, fir example. My company needed to go through that. So a company with a number of products might spend a hundred thousand for certification for everything. But I’d like got see where that’s in the certification documents.

mkrayewsky

How about making your existing HomeKit devices more reliable. As every once in a while, they become unresponsive and not recognized by HomeKit. I’d like to see Belkin work and resolve this issue first, before even considering going to another standard.

applezulu

When Belkin first introduced Wemo devices, they promised that they would become HomeKit compatible as HomeKit was just rolling out. I bought some light switches and plugs based on that promise. I even saved a Belkin customer service chat with that promise in writing. Then there was radio silence. Then they announced that no, they would not be HomeKit compatible. Then a year later, they announced they were releasing a HomeKit Bridge that would make most of their existing legacy hardware HomeKit compatible after all! That bridge was flaky as all get-out and received very little support, and to my knowledge, no firmware updates, ever. I eventually connected the bridge's power supply to a HomeKit-compatible plug from another vendor, just so I could write a shortcut script to automatically cycle the thing through a forced reboot every night. That seemed to help. Some. Sort of.

Then Belkin introduced natively HomeKit compatible devices, which, at least in my experience, further complicated the flakiness, in combination with the bridge and legacy devices. Somewhere around this point, I replaced my deprecated AirPort routers with eero mesh routers, thinking maybe the network itself was the problem. That wasn't it. Switches and plugs would randomly (as noted in another post above) become unresponsive, and/or be unrecognized by HomeKit, usually in a cascading collapse, making much of the "smart home" experience profoundly dumb. I'd see an alert pop up that one of the devices was offline. Then another, and another and another. I found myself going through the house, individually rebooting each switch, hoping to isolate a culprit device that was somehow triggering the Wemo-wide collapse.

Finally, I found the solution to the whole problem.

I removed every single %&*# Wemo switch and plug, and replaced them with Leviton switches and plugs. No more Wemo for me. Other than a few very sporadic, isolated hiccups, the Leviton devices have been rock-solid reliable.

So all this is to say that it's no surprise that Belkin would promise to be "matter" compatible, then announce that they won't, but that they're 'rethinking their strategy.' They've got a lot to rethink about.

9secondkox2

Lame. Belkin wants to take a nice standard and try to force people into a more Belkin-centric setup. 

No thanks. I want to be able to buy belkin’s best thing, mix it with Phillip’s best thing that does something else, etc. not settle for less just to satisfy her be company’s pride and pocketbook. 

I doubt it works well for them.  

dewme

This is not an unusual occurrence at all within the domain of standards. It's kind of a running joke with people who work on standards that whenever you hear about a new standard that's going to replace, say, 3 other standards. In most cases the final result is that you end up with 4 standards. There are so many reasons why this happens but there are a few things that come up repeatedly, in no particular order:

1. Who owns the system? Does Apple intend HomeKit and the Home app to be the center of the universe for all Matter devices on Apple clients/servers?

2. What part of the system really drives the revenue? Is it the razor or the razor blades?

3. Account control wrt attachment of accessories and peripherals that work in a vendor's system. Vendors want their customers sticking with them. Only them.

4. Customers want "best of breed" choices across product categories. Product vendors, um, not so much. They want to sell you all of their stuff.

5. Commoditization with constrained price elasticity. Do we really need 16 gas stations at every intersection all selling gas within 2 cents of each other?

6. Lack of differentiation within product categories. Does the standard allow for flexibility/extension within standard product categories?

7. Anything managed by committees will be slow to execute, evolve, and adapt. Standards are by their nature managed by committees.

8. Bottlenecks in compliance, conformity, and certification if the processes are centralized. Self-certification needs to be allowed at some level.

9. Legacy support for older products that were built prior the new standard. Vendors need to keep those support people around and hire new ones too.

10. Preservation of investment and sunk costs for both customers and vendors. Need mechanisms for interoperability of the old with the new. Rarely a clean slate.

11. Product vendors never want to resort to trench warfare, which is competing based on price. Race to the bottom is unsustainable.

12. The rate of adoption and uptake of new standard-compliant products is often too slow to justify the cost of adoption. Waiting may help.

Those are a few that I've personally encountered. If I add a Lucky 13 it would be whether I can build/buy a complete/turnkey system using all or mostly components that are standard-compliant. If I can't build-out my whole system around the new standard or if incorporating components from other standards is ugly or costly, I'm probably going to hold off until the new standard matures some more and controls a bigger share of the market. I think this is the biggest impediment for Matter today. Businesses can't harvest revenue today from "coming soon" or promised capability. With so many businesses eating their own children to make this quarter's numbers look good, they are only going to go with turnkey solutions - technology wizardry be damned.

edited March 2023

netrox

And we have absolutely no evidence of Home Architecture being fixed or updated in the next update. That is concerning. 

slevit1

All of this nonsense is why when I built my current house, it was all done with Control4. I have one app that controls everything in my house, from A/V, to lights, to blinds, to door locks, etc, and it can do damn near anything you can think up. Most importantly, it’s rock solid. Yes, it’s more expensive, but I’m willing to pay the price to have things that work together, work properly, and work every time. And not have to remember what app does what! 

loopless

It's a cynical move for sure. At the moment they can make good money in the HomeKit market as all the cheap junk from China won't go to the trouble and expense to be HK compatible. If Matter catches on and the playing field is leveled, "poof" goes their profit margin and they have to compete with the bottom dwellers. So their response is to try to sabotage the Matter roll out... nice!

phaseangle

Their problem is that they sell cheap junk from China with their bad firmware on top.
Belkin needs to fix their firmware and compete in the midrange market and make midrange products.

ed243

Please, please, please save yourself a lot of aggravation and money and never by into Wemo.  My Wemo switches have been flakey since I first installed them when my house was built in 2020.  I've wasted hours on the phone with tech support.  Many of the issues seem to have something to do with the Wemo app screwing up something in Wemo's cloud database and most tech support people can only run you through the factory reset script.  In addition, the Wemo HomeKit bridge is complete junk and needs rebooting up to multiple times a week.  I have been migrating to Lutron Caseta switches.  They are expensive but have been rock solid with HomeKit over the past couple of years.