Google started bringing Matter support to its smart home devices last year, but Amazon wasn’t ready to turn off its own hardware just yet. That’s changing now, as Matter support is rolling out to some of Amazon’s smart home devices.
Amazon has announced a new update for Matter-compatible Alexa devices as the company confirms it has surpassed 100 million Matter-enabled Echo smart speakers. Previously, setting up Matter devices with Amazon Alexa required using an Android phone, and could only be done over Wi-Fi. But now Amazon is rolling out a major update that will allow not only devices to be installed on an iOS phone, but also devices that run on Thread.
As for Amazon’s own products, the company said in a blog post: “We allowed the second-gen Echo, Echo Plus and Echo Dot devices to be upgraded as Matter controllers, plus the Echo (4th Gen) as a Thread edge router. That means Echo (4th generation) customers can now extend their smart homes with Matter-enabled Thread devices, in addition to WiFi, Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Mesh and Matter-enabled WiFi devices.”
This means you’ll be able to use a wider range of devices in the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, such as Eve smart plugs, which use Thread instead of Wi-Fi to communicate. It also means that you won’t be dependent on having an internet connection for these devices to communicate with each other.
There are still improvements to be made. For one thing, Alexa doesn’t yet support bridges in Thread, regardless of today’s update, which may limit some of the devices you can register with the platform. However, its full support is ready.
Source: Amazon
Via: The Verge