Home Assistant releases December release with Matter support

Home Assistant has released a new version of its smart home platform with support for Matter built in. The smart home standard is available as an alpha version and is especially interesting for developers, because there are hardly any Matter products on the market.

The support for the smart home standard is included the December release, 2022.12. Matter is available therein as an integration. The makers of Home Assistant write that for the time being it is still an alpha release, “or maybe even a developer preview”. This also allows external developers of the open source Home Assistant to experiment and send pull requests to improve integration. Devices can be added through the web interface as well as through the Android or iOS apps.

Matter is a smart home standard supported by dozens of small and large manufacturers. That open standard could receive broad support in the smart home world, but at the moment there are hardly any devices on the market that support the standard. Home Assistant seems to sort it out for that. The platform releases such beta features more frequently in regular releases.

The December release also includes other features, including “features” in the new Tile cards. This allows users to add additional elements to the recently introduced Tiles, such as a brightness slider. A local calendar is also added, which means that users no longer have to use external calendars such as Google Calendar. In addition, a new entity has been added: text. This allows users to enter text as part of an integration.