Popular smart home vendor Eve, maker of some of the best HomeKit devices you can buy, has today announced a massive new upgrade that's coming to all of its Thread-enabled products, starting with three popular options later this year.
That upgrade is support for Matter, a brand new smart home connectivity standard that will bring unprecedented interoperability to your smart home. It will allow devices from major smart home players to work with each other, such as lights, security cameras, and energy products from companies like Nanoleaf, Netatmo, Eve, Philips Hue (Signify), and more. The products will all work with Siri and Apple's smart home hubs, but also Amazon and Google products like Nest, and virtual assistants like Alexa.
Eve says that, in time, all 14 of its Thread-enabled Eve devices will receive free Matter firmware updates enabling this new connectivity, the first three are coming on December 12.
Big changes for Eve
The first three products to get the firmware upgrade are smart plug Eve Energy, contact sensor Eve Door & Window, (one of the best HomeKit door and window sensors you can buy), and one of its best HomeKit motion sensors, the Eve Motion.
The upgrades are free and will mean these products can be used beyond Apple's HomeKit ecosystem (now Apple Home) with a swathe of supported Matter devices including Amazon and Google Hubs, as well as their respective voice assistants. To enable this, Eve (which has been iOS-exclusive thus far) will roll out a new Android app in the first quarter of 2023.
That launch will also accompany Eve's first-ever Matter-certified products coming to retail, with out-of-the-box Matter compatibility, no firmware update required.
Eve is one of the few companies supporting Matter that have committed a good deal of support to bringing Matter to its older, existing devices. This is in part thanks to Eve's commitment to Thread, a lower-energy mesh network designed for the smart home that offers significant benefits over Wi-Fi including reduced energy usage, no need for bridges, faster response times, better battery life, and more.
Eve's over-the-air update for its first three Thread-enabled devices will be released on December 12.
