Matter feature gap tracker: spec against shipping reality

The tracker#

Definitions used above, and the reason we use three states rather than a checkmark:

• Shipping: the platform documents the feature as available to end users.
• Partial: it works with a documented limitation, such as one device class only, a beta channel, a specific hub model, or a developer-facing interface rather than the app.
• Not yet: no vendor documentation shows user-facing support. This is not a prediction that it will never arrive.

The notes column in the dataset carries the evidence for each cell.

The headline number#

Google shipped the Matter 1.2 appliance device types in September 2025. Matter 1.2 was published in October 2023. That is a gap of roughly 23 months between a device type becoming certifiable and the largest Android smart home platform exposing it to users.

That figure is not an outlier. It is the pattern:

Where the standard actually landed, by product count#

A second way to read the same problem: count how many products exist for each device type. The specification treats a light bulb and a heat pump as equally defined. The market does not.

Three things fall out of that table.

Lighting and plugs are finished work. More than two thousand certified lighting and plug products exist. If your smart home is lights, plugs and a few sensors, Matter genuinely delivers what it promised, on every platform.

The 2024 and 2025 energy work has produced no hardware at all. Solar power, battery storage, water heaters, heat pumps and device energy management all have zero certified products. Matter defined a complete vendor-neutral home energy stack in November 2025 that would insulate owners from exactly the cloud shutdowns this site documents elsewhere, and no energy vendor has shipped it. That is the largest gap between promise and reality in the standard.

Closures have zero products ten months after the specification. Garage doors and gates are the categories where people most want a standard, and Matter's answer exists only on paper. The older window covering device type from Matter 1.0 does work, which is why blinds are buyable and garage doors are not.

Why the gap exists#

It is tempting to read the delay as laziness. The mechanism is more mundane, and understanding it helps you predict what will actually arrive.

1. The specification is published. Nothing is buyable at this point.
2. Silicon vendors implement it in their SDKs. Months.
3. Device makers build products, then certify them. Months, plus certification cost, which runs into thousands of dollars per product on top of alliance membership.
4. Each controller implements the device type in its own app, which means new user interface, new voice grammar, new automation triggers, translation into a dozen languages, and support documentation.
5. The controller ships it, usually in a seasonal release.

Step 4 is where the time goes, and it is also where the incentives bite. A platform that sells cameras and camera subscriptions has no commercial reason to hurry a standard that makes any camera work anywhere. That is not a conspiracy theory, it is the observable order in which features arrive: the categories platforms do not sell hardware in tend to land first.

What this means when you are buying#

Three practical rules:

• Do not buy on the strength of a specification version. A Matter 1.5 camera bought for an Apple Home household is a camera you will be using through the vendor's app.
• Treat energy management as a platform decision, not a device decision. If solar, battery or EV charging integration matters to you, that alone selects Home Assistant, SmartThings or Homey. The Matter energy page explains what each exposes.
• Check the "partial" column carefully. A feature that works in a developer console but not in the app is not a feature. Home Assistant's Matter camera support is exactly this case today.

Method#

For each release we record the publication date, the device types and features introduced, and then, for each major controller, whether the feature is exposed to users according to that vendor's own documentation. Press announcements and roadmap statements do not count as evidence, because roadmaps are not features. Community reports are used to detect that something is broken, never as the sole basis for marking something shipping.

Scoring rules and update cadence are on the methodology page. This tracker is version 2026.09 and the underlying data is published as JSON under CC BY 4.0.

For the full release history including device type counts taken from the published data model, see every Matter version and what shipped in it.