A major piece of the smart home market now supports the Matter standard. The 2020 Nest Thermostat is the first smart thermostat to join in the slow-going wave and, in doing so, now works in an Apple Home system without additional bridges or hubs.
Take note that only the 2020 redesign of the Nest Thermostat will be updated with Matter support, starting today and rolling out “over the next few weeks,” according to a Google Nest Community post. Google has said it is investigating Matter support for the more common Nest (3rd generation) Learning Thermostat and Nest Thermostat E (now mainly available in Europe). Let’s hope it does, because the Learning Thermostat has the broadest compatibility across HVAC systems and is the one we see installed in most homes, at about a 100-to-zero rate versus the 2020 version.
If you have a newer Nest, your device will quietly absorb an over-the-air update at some point today or in the next few weeks. After that, you can control your Nest from multiple Matter-compliant systems. Nest already worked with Amazon’s Alexa, Samsung’s SmartThings, and, of course, Google’s Home platform. But with Matter support, you can set it up to interact with other Matter-enabled devices, such as non-Nest temperature sensors or motion detectors.
The big addition is Apple compatibility through Home’s own Matter readiness. With the update installed, the Nest Thermostat itself can generate a Matter pairing code inside new settings on the device. That should allow you to add the device to a Home network and control it from an Apple device without using another device as a go-between. I use Home Assistant to connect all my smart home gear to my iPhone, but I don’t think that is, per se, the easy way; I had to sign up for a Google developer account and create a fake app to get API access.
Not that Matter is necessarily easy at the moment. There are very few actual devices that you can control from the major tech companies’ Matter-ready platforms. Some major device makers are taking “big steps back” while the complications shake out. And there are lots of little compatibility caveats to each platform. But getting a Nest thermostat into the ecosystem, even just one relatively new one, seems like it can only help to move things along.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1932752