Home Assistant announces official Matter support

Home Assistant, the largest open-source smart home platform, announced Monday that it has officially received Matter certification. The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) has certified both Home Assistant and the Open Home Foundation Matter Server, marking a milestone for open-source smart home solutions.

Home Assistant has two certifications, Matter spec 1.3, one for the interface and one for the backend component, so Home Assistant itself won’t need recertification on each update, which is quite frequent – one major update and several minor patches monthly.

Does it matter?

Home Assistant’s certification doesn't change its existing Matter functionality for users. Certification for Matter Controller – a device or software component to set up and control devices – is more for industry credibility. Uncertified Matter devices and apps must mark their Matter feature with a “Beta” label due to alliance requirements, not just stability issues. For instance, that’s almost the days you see Ikea removed the label when they got officially certification.

Official certifications signify that Home Assistant passed lab tests, ensuring stability and compatibility, which is important for building a reliable Matter smart home.

Such certifications are sometimes bypassed due to a tight budget and development lifecycle. Your door sensor won't remind you of that, but on the flip side, Apple or Google will show no mercy and warn you every time you attempt to add a non-certified Matter device.

The alliance told Matter Alpha that there is no certification fee exemption for open-source projects at the moment; a membership and related procedure are required to get Matter certifications. Home Assistant stated in its press release that the certification fee was from the Home Assistant Cloud subscription.

Committed adopter

Home Assistant has supported Matter since the release of the Matter 1.0 spec in 2022. Since then, it has become one of the fastest adopters among major platforms, consistently integrating new Matter versions, device types, and features. According to its GitHub commits, it was among the first platforms to support Matter 1.3 in beta and initially supported Matter 1.4 within a month of its release.

Home Assistant also offers essential features such as firmware updates via Matter, power-on state configurations, and on/off transition settings for Matter devices. These features are currently absent from most Matter platforms.

There are at least 92,660 active Home Assistant installations using Matter integration, accounting for a quarter of its total user base.