The Matter smart home open standard promises to tidy up the mess that has been smart home products over the years, and it's off to a promising start. Samsung has announced that it will be supporting Matter-compatible devices on its SmartThings ecosystem and bringing its own products up to speed.
The South Korean giant announced an expanded partnership with Google to not only welcome Matter products into its ecosystem, but also to support interoperability with Google's own Home ecosystem. If you have any smart home devices set up in Google Home that SmartThings can support as well, it will prompt you to set them up on the other app, and vice versa. Users will no longer have to manually add each of their devices one at a time, nor will they have to worry about which ecosystem their device has been configured on initially.
And to allow for Matter products to be enrolled, Samsung's SmartThings hubs are getting an update to support them very soon. Once the update is out, you'll be able to control Matter devices through Wi-Fi and Ethernet via the v2 hub, while the AEOTEC v3 hub and the SmartThings dongle will also function as Thread border routers.
This update should arrive later this month, so if you're in Samsung's ecosystem of smart home products and you have any Matter devices, or if you were planning to buy any, you can expect them to work more closely very soon.