New smart home standard Matter was just made official with much fanfare in a dedicated launch event in Amsterdam. In the midst of all this celebration, one potential stumbling block became clear: if you want to use all your great smart home devices with multiple voice assistants (a new possibility enabled by Matter), be prepared to go through the whole setup processes for each of these ecosystems you want your devices to work with. Thankfully, Samsung, Google, and Amazon are working together on making that much easier.

How Matter can improve the smart home right now

Let's preface this with the chances that Matter offers for smart home ecosystems. When you build your smart home today, you're forced to begin with the decision of which platform you want to use to control and automate all of your smart devices. You've got your pick of services like Google Home, Apple HomeKit, or Samsung SmartThings, but without Matter, that decision is binary — you can either control your smart home through one or the other.

Some companies tackle this problem by supporting each other's ecosystems with custom integrations (which is why you can control a Samsung smart home through Google Assistant already), but this comes with significant development overhead and costs. It's often also an all-or-nothing affair, with smart home builders largely left with the choice to connect all devices from one ecosystem with another, or none at all, rather than picking and choosing.

Matter changes this thanks to support for multi-admin, a foundational part of the protocol. Multi-admin allows you to integrate your smart home devices into multiple ecosystems at once, making it possible to control one smart light bulb across Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri — or whatever other ecosystem.

Privacy-first smart home company Eve demonstrated just that during the event with its own products. In its booth, the company showed off how it connected the same smart outlet to the Google Home app and a Nest Hub, an Amazon Echo speaker, and an iPhone and a HomePod. It was possible to turn on and off the plug (or rather, the lamp connected to it) with all of the voice assistants, seamlessly.

What makes this even more exciting is that Eve previously only worked with Apple’s HomeKit. The company aimed for a local-network-only approach that doesn’t require people to sign up for yet another online service only to control their home, and Apple was the only platform to allow for this. With Matter, this is now possible in all ecosystems. With this in mind, Eve will also finally launch an Android app before March 2023 and update its existing products to support Matter in December, making it possible to leave HomeKit for other ecosystems.

A convoluted setup process could slow the adoption of multi-ecosystem homes

While many smart home aficionados probably only rely on a single platform, the benefit really comes into play when you consider other household members or tighter integrations with mobile devices. Matter makes it possible to control your smart home ecosystem with your Alexa speakers, your Samsung SmartThings app on your tablet, and Google Assistant on your phone, while your partner might prefer to stick with Siri on their iPhone.

The only real pitfall left is the difficult setup process. Right now, you need to set up each product anew on all of your ecosystems — a Matter smart bulb that you’ve set up in Samsung SmartThings won’t automatically show up in your Google Home app, and vice versa. This makes sense, since you need to give explicit consent to connect to a new platform. After all, there is nothing that tells Matter devices that both the Google Home app and the SmartThings app on your phone are yours.

Even when you buy yourself your first load of fancy Matter smart bulbs, you will need to set them up in both your Google Home and SmartThings app as a brand-new thing. This can be tedious, especially when you throw even more ecosystems into the mix. Samsung and Google are working on fixing this issue, though. As Samsung announced in October during its annual developer conference, the companies are teaming up to give you the option to import and export smart home devices across SmartThings and Google Home. This means that in the future, you could just tap a button in the respective apps to make your smart home devices work with both platforms.

This simpler integration of Matter smart home devices between Samsung and Google will roll out in 2023. During the Matter launch event, Samsung also announced that same partnership with Amazon.

We’re only at the beginning of this venture, so it’s likely that other companies will work on similar integrations. Until we get there, we’re stuck with smart homes that are almost perfectly in sync across ecosystems — save for the setup process. We can only hope that this simple setup transfer will make it to more ecosystems, as this could truly transform how accessible a smart home is to everyone.