Matter promised one app for every smart home, but only Home Assistant actually delivered it for me
One app to rule them all, and in the protocols bind them
In 2022, Matter launched with a promise to integrate all smart home devices into a single app. However, four years later, the reality is quite different. Apple Home, Google Home, and Alexa each offer different slices of a home's capabilities, with the remaining functionality hidden in the respective vendor's app. The only comprehensive solution seems to be Home Assistant, a platform running on a Proxmox box in the author's office.
Home Assistant demonstrates the full picture of a home's devices, even if it requires setting up a virtual machine. While Matter has expanded to include more device types, the responsibility of supporting each device type remains with individual platforms. This means that even though Matter supports a device type, the app might not provide complete access to the device's functionalities.
For example, Home Assistant can display 17 entities for a single smart plug, including energy data that Apple Home only started showing in September 2025, 17 months after the plug's firmware offered it. Despite these challenges, Home Assistant manages to provide a unified view of all smart home devices, making it easier for users to manage their entire home with just one app.
Written by urgent.news from XDA Developers's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
