My Matter network on HomeKit (I)

As we’ve already mentioned on a previous occasion, with the arrival of iOS 16.2, the door opened to update Apple’s Home app and get the infrastructure ready for Matter. In reality this update turned out a bit rough and many users reported issues, glitches with family member invitations, homes disappearing and becoming unmanageable… a real mess. Long story short, Apple suspended the ability to update the Home app.

Updating the Home app and HomeKit architecture

Since I’m a bit of a scatterbrain, I updated as soon as it was possible, despite all the problems people were reporting… and luckily for me, everything went fine. However, once I updated the architecture, with the whole migration process it talked about, all the time it took, which also included updating the HomePods as accessory hubs, I noticed absolutely nothing. Everything worked exactly the same as before, good or bad, but with zero changes. A few days later, the folks at Eve published a website where you could sign up to get the Eve beta firmware for their devices, making them compatible with Matter. As you know, many Eve devices are already Thread-based, which means they’ll eventually become Matter compatible, but until then, the devices were connecting through the new protocol without yet being Matter compatible. Anyway, I updated the Eve app via TestFlight, the App Store’s beta program, and when I logged in and all the devices showed up, it also gave me the option to update my Eve gadgets with the beta Matter firmware… and once again, since I’m a scatterbrain and wanted to tell you all about it, I went ahead and updated the door sensors and the smart plugs. Although at first everything worked just as well, with no significant changes. Yes, the devices are now Matter, which means they can connect to any Matter-compatible service. In fact, when you open the device, it tells you which services it’s connected to—in my case, Apple Home (as Apple calls it) and Home Assistant. I’ll tell you more about that second part soon. The great thing about this is that the device is visible from both platforms without doing anything to link them together—no need for a bridge or an integration in Home Assistant like you needed until now. The device is simply able to connect to both and be used from either. I haven’t noticed any difference between turning on a Matter-updated Eve plug from Home or from Home Assistant—both work equally well.

Some devices disappear from the Home app

But since the firmware is beta and we were already warned some things might break… well, sure enough, they are. I’ve got several door sensors that vanish from Home, dragging their notifications and automations down with them—of course, since when you delete a device, it leaves the automations in the automations list, but the device itself disappears, so it just doesn’t work… but it’s still there. When a device disconnects from the network but doesn’t disappear, no big deal; once it reconnects, the automation keeps working fine. However, for me it disappears completely, as if we’d deleted it ourselves. This happens, for example, with the door sensor I have at my home’s entrance… and it’s a real pain because I have a ton of automations tied to that sensor! For example, if it’s nighttime and I walk in, it turns on the living room lamp at 50% and switches it off after 4 minutes. If I’m coming home after a run or the gym and it’s cold out, it turns on the bathroom heater as I walk in, so the bathroom warms up while I’m taking off my shoes and all that. Not to mention the notifications—when I’m not home and the door opens, I get a critical notification. But if I’m not home while my wife is, for instance, only a regular (non-critical) notification comes through. That way, if my phone is on silent or some do-not-disturb mode, I don’t get pinged, because there’s no need for me to know in real time. And of course, all of this disappears when the device disappears. All the notifications get deleted, the automations too, and so on. Even the name and sensor type. When it shows up again (which could take a few minutes or a couple of days), it comes back with the default name and default type (contact sensor), and I have to build everything from scratch again. The funny thing is that this ONLY happens to me in Home, meaning HomeKit—it doesn’t happen in Home Assistant. And it’s also strange that it doesn’t happen in the Eve app either; that sensor never disappears there. It’s just Home that, for whatever reason, loses sight of it. Even stranger is that it doesn’t happen with all of them, and there’s no clear pattern. I thought that, being in beta, the firmware was being updated frequently and that’s what was causing it to disappear, but no—it hasn’t been updated that often… and besides, it’s been updated on all the door sensors I have, yet not all of them have disappeared. You can probably guess that by the third time this happened to me, I migrated all the notifications and automations related to that sensor over to Home Assistant, and I haven’t had a single problem since. And you might be wondering—how could you connect it to Home Assistant if it’s Matter and connects via Thread, and Home Assistant doesn’t support that yet because it lacks the physical antenna? Great question, glad you asked! I’ll explain it in more detail later, but the short version is that I bought the SkyConnect, a USB dongle similar to the typical Sonoff ones we’ve talked about many times, except this one includes ZigBee and Thread connectivity, which makes it possible to detect Thread devices and connect to them from Home Assistant. I bought it at https://www.electropolis.es/home-assistant-skyconnect-a-zigbee-thread-matter-usb-stick-for-home-assistant-in-mkc-nab-kie-skyusb-752739.html. But like I said, I’ll cover that in more detail in a future post. Nothing weird has happened with the plugs—they’ve been working fine from day one, so I’ve been using them without any issues. In other words, they’re working just as well as before. So, right now, if we have an app capable of showing us our Thread network, like the Eve app or Home Assistant with the new Thread integration, I can see that I have a bunch of devices connected via Thread, such as all my Eve devices, the HomePods, and the Apple TV. In the Eve app, we can’t even tell which device is which—it just gives us an identifier and the role it’s playing within the Thread network, but you can’t tell which device it actually corresponds to… so what I did was disconnect them all and reconnect them one by one, writing down the ID so I’d know which identifier matched which device. In the Home Assistant integration, though, it does tell us which device each ID corresponds to and what role it plays within the Thread network—whether it’s a border router, a router, or an endpoint. Needless to say, from the Home app you can’t see any of this at all—there’s no easy way to know whether something connects via Thread, Wi-Fi, or ZigBee. However, if we go to Settings > General, we can actually see the Matter Accessories we have on the network and which services those devices are connected to. It doesn’t really make much sense that they’re listed there—Bluetooth devices, for example, are found within the Bluetooth section, so I’m not sure why Matter devices sit outside the Home app, but oh well. The most important takeaway from all this is that, if we set aside the stability issues with the sensors—which might be due to the firmware or to the problems Apple detected in the Home app that led to the architecture migration being paused—I haven’t noticed any significant change in the performance of Matter-compatible devices. It’s true that I like being able to see them directly in both Home Assistant and Home without needing bridge-style integrations, which I’ve never been too fond of, since if the bridge fails, you lose access to every device behind it… but aside from that, I haven’t noticed any greater speed or stability than when all these devices were connecting via ZigBee, which confirms what I told you a few weeks ago: right now, I don’t think it’s worth investing in swapping out ZigBee devices for Matter ones if they’re already working well. But if we need to buy new devices for whatever reason, then yeah, it might well be worth going for Matter.