Original research
Original analyses built from published rubrics and public inputs, with the raw data downloadable so you can disagree with our weighting and recompute it.
The work#
- The Local Control Index 2026Every major platform scored on what keeps working during an outage, with the rubric and the raw data published.
- Matter feature gap trackerWhich Matter features each major controller actually exposes, and how many months behind the specification it is.
- The Thread fragmentation reportThe state of Thread network merging, vendor by vendor, and why the fix has been arriving for two years.
- Twenty years of smart home standardsX10 to Matter 1.6, read as five waves. What each promised, what it delivered, what limited it, and what the pattern predicts about buying in 2026.
How this differs from a review#
We do not run a testing lab, and we do not pretend to. What we do instead is take inputs that anyone can check (specifications, certification records, vendor documentation, release notes) and apply a stated rule to them consistently. That produces conclusions you can argue with in a useful way: if you think local voice control deserves more than ten points, you can take the dataset and reweight it in a spreadsheet in five minutes.
Three principles run through all of it, and they are set out in full on the methodology page:
- Inputs are facts, weights are opinions, and the two are kept separate.
- Unknown is not zero. Where a vendor does not document a behavior, we say so rather than scoring it as a failure.
- Everything is versioned and dated. A rubric change is announced, not applied silently.
The datasets#
| Dataset | What it holds | Used by |
|---|---|---|
[local_control.json](/data/local_control.json) | Eight-criterion scores for seven platforms, with reasoning | Local Control Index, outage audit |
[matter_gaps.json](/data/matter_gaps.json) | Feature by feature controller support states | Feature gap tracker |
[matter_adoption.json](/data/matter_adoption.json) | Certified product counts by Matter device type | Feature gap tracker |
[matter_versions.json](/data/matter_versions.json) | Every Matter release with device type counts from the published data model | Matter versions |
[border_routers.json](/data/border_routers.json) | Every shipping Thread border router with its documented Thread version | Border routers, finder tool |
[platforms.json](/data/platforms.json) | The full platform matrix | Platform comparison, picker |
[channels.json](/data/channels.json) | Computed 802.15.4 channel map against US Wi-Fi channels | Interference, channel planner |
All seven are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Use them, adapt them, credit us with a link.
Corrections welcome#
If a score is wrong, the fastest way to change it is a link to vendor documentation showing the behavior. That gets read first and acted on. Errors we find or that readers report are logged on the corrections page.