Will Matter be able to do what he always had to do?

Matter, the smart home standard, can achieve something that should have existed from day one: a single distributed network of Matter that is managed by multiple ecosystems. With this feature, called Joint Fabric, smart devices added to the network can be controlled by any approved platform – Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and others. There’s no need to “share” your smart light between apps; set it up once, and control it everywhere. It’s like your smart home is a connected bank account and all your platforms have signature capabilities.

Joint Fabric is part of new version of Matter 1.6 was announced this week to Connectinaugural meeting of the Connectivity Standards Alliance, in Austin, Texas. Although there are no new device types in the specification, there are several live updates.

There is now support for full NFC implementation, which removes the need to scan the QR code and allows you to tap to connect. With this, you can also pair a device before switching it on – which can be useful when installing smart bulbs or a smart wired switch.

Also new is the Thermostat Concept, a standard way for these devices to interact with the rest of the environment. It allows the environment to send time-based “instructions” that the thermostat can delay or adapt based on input from other platforms.

This idea is that if you manually change the temperature on one tower, the thermostat will ignore the sudden request that comes after a while. Also your Apple Home system can’t beat the savings program you signed up for, and your preferences like air quality optimization are recognized across all services.

But back to the Joint Fabric thing. Aside from playing more prominently in the ’70s road trip movie than on a smart home level, Joint Fabric was designed to advance one of Matter’s main features, many admins. This is where you need to set up a device in one smart home app and use it on any other Matter compatible platform.

Today, each environment creates and manages its own network (called fabric) and can share resources across it (hard). Joint Fabric creates a single Matter network that Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and others can sign into. You add a device once, and it appears in all authorized locations. You can reclaim the control at any time without losing any of your tools.

This opens up many possibilities for connecting your smart home as Matter originally intended. It is part of add multi-adminan ongoing effort to make using multiple devices easier.

Until now, there have been problems with cooperation one of the great barriers of Matter – a familiar story at the interactive level. It’s not that the CSA didn’t answer them; is that platforms are slow to adopt new innovations, which can lead to conflict.

Setting up and managing a single device, with easy access and customization on any platform, was something that I thought would be part of Matter when it was launched in 2022. learning this was not how it worked. Back then, I was told that Matter didn’t work like that because platform developers didn’t want to. Four years later, has that opinion changed?

There was a similar experiment back then Issue 1.4 in 2024 called Fabric Sync, which allows devices installed in one environment to be shared with others with a single license. But each platform still runs its own separate network. At that time, CSA told me that all the major players participated in the development of a solution to the problemand it was expected that he would achieve it in the following year. It’s 2026, and we’re waiting.

Joint Fabric feels like a bigger ask than Fabric Sync, effectively taking it off the platforms and putting it where it should be: in your hands. My hopes are not high that this will see a quick pick up. I will be at CSA’s Unify conference in Austin this week, and I plan to ask environmentalists about their time to use Joint Fabric.