Belkin is unsure of where they are going when it comes to home automation products, and we got a hint of it when Belkin’s global CEO Steve Malony was in Australia last year.
Pushed on the issue of home automation and Matter during an exclusive ChannelNews interview in Sydney, Maloney claimed that automation was still a “work in progress”.
Now it’s been revealed the Apple-centric accessory Company has “paused” development totally of Matter-certified devices for use in a Smart House.
Wemo and Belkin both hitched their accessories wagon hitched to Apple’s train after Foxconn, a major global supplier to Apple, purchased Belkin.
Some insiders claim the reason Belkin could be walking away from Matter is because they may have inside knowledge, with some speculating Apple is developing their own HomeKit home automation products.
When the Cupertino giant releases new software and hardware features, Belkin and its subsidiaries are often the first to market with products supporting them, and the fact they are walking away from developing Matter products raises questions as to what they know.
Wemo, Belkin’s smart home company, has struggled to be a player in the automation market, and they are now claiming they want to bring to market a suite of products that will “differentiate the brand in the market”.
This is not surprising, as Wemo was a total disaster in Australia.
Instead of launching their new automation products branded as Belkin, or even as Linksys, a logical networking brand that Belkin owned, the business chose to introduce Wemo-branded products as their smart home automation offering.
Belkin purchased Linksys, which was well known for its home routers, in 2013 and many in the industry said this was the brand the Company should have used to launch home automation technology.
Like Wemo, Linksys, which was a well-known networking brand in Australia having been owned by Cisco and managed by Graeme Reardon, the now CEO of D Link in Australia.
Owned by Belkin, the Linksys business struggled to hold onto market share after Belkin took over with retailers such as JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman, dropping the brand despite a surge in demand for fast broadband connectivity.
In 2018, Belkin and its subsidiaries, including Linksys, were acquired by Foxconn, a Taiwanese multinational electronics firm and the largest provider of electronics manufacturing services, for US$866 million.
Debra Benson, a PR representative for Wemo, confirmed overnight that, while the company remains convinced that “Matter will have a significantly positive impact on the smart home industry,” it has decided to “take a big step back, regroup, and rethink’’ its approach to smart home technology.
Benson went on to write that Wemo will bring new Matter products to market when it can find a way to differentiate them.
Their latest move comes after the Wemo business announced at CES 2022 that they would bring Thread-compatible, Matter-compliant products to market when that new standard officially arrived.
While Wemo updated some products to use Thread, the primary wireless protocol used by Matter as the standard that enables Wi-Fi-free local control of smart devices to work across multiple platforms, the Company has now halted development of Matter-related products.
None of the new products being sold in the US market — a light switch, dimmer switch, plug, and a stick-on-the-wall three-button scene controller — are slated for future Matter support.
In Australia, JB Hi-Fi and the likes of Big W and Harvey Norman have all stopped selling Wemo products.
Matter was developed to solve near-universal smart home platform compatibility, including with the Apple HomeKit.
The Wemo Matter products sold in the USA only work with Apple HomeKit.
Currently, several big brands are steaming ahead in the development of Matter products.
Late last year, Samsung announced a partnership with Google to allow for special onboarding between the two ecosystems — when you add a Matter device to one, it will port over to the other automatically.
Recently, they announced a similar partnership with Amazon.
There’s been no indication of any such collaboration with Apple, which, in the past, has claimed that its HomeKit platform served as the foundation of Matter.
According to Digital Trends, Apple itself remains protective of its own smart assistant, requiring that customers own at least one HomePod before it will let Siri live on another device, making Sonos cranky, along with Apple’s own customers, who are forced to talk to their Ecobee if they want Siri on anything outside of Apple’s home devices.
Matter, like 5G, self-driving cars, and the useful robots that came before it, has turned out to be much messier and more complicated than was promised, and it looks like that’s not going to end anytime soon. WeMo’s move to pause Matter development is an early reflection of that fact, and while it doesn’t necessarily spell doom for the new standard, it does show that the smart home still has a long row to hoe before our home of the future is realised.
Digital Trends, who broke the Belkin story, claim they have asked Belkin for more details on its decision, but it did not respond by press time.
likes of Amazon.
