Exciting news for smart home enthusiasts! The Nest Thermostat (2020) will now support the latest smart home standard, Matter, starting April 18th.
This is a significant development as it makes the Nest Thermostat the first smart thermostat to be compatible with Matter. This means that Nest Thermostat users will be able to work with Apple Home seamlessly, without any workarounds like HomeBridge. The rollout of the update is expected to be completed within a few weeks, allowing users to connect their Nest Thermostat to any Matter smart home platform using Wi-Fi.
Thanks to this update, Nest users can easily adjust features such as temperature, mode, and fan speeds directly from the Apple Home app. They can also use voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, and Google Home as they do now, but with Matter, the connection will be entirely local instead of cloud-based. Furthermore, it means that Nest users can finally take advantage of the superior automation options offered by HomeKit, which were previously unavailable in the Google Home ecosystem.
There is one catch: the update will only apply to the 2020 Nest Thermostat model. However, Google has hinted that they may bring Matter to both the Nest Learning Thermostat and the Nest Thermostat E in the future. For now, this update is a significant step in the right direction for Google, which, like Amazon, has been a bit slow in adopting Matter so far.