Hello readers!

This week, we’re talking about the smart home’s next fight after Matter, the EU Cyber Resilience Act deadline, why industrial AI projects stall after the dashboard, and more!

For most of the smart home’s history, buying a device meant choosing a side. A lock worked with Alexa or with HomeKit, a sensor needed its maker’s bridge, and leaving an ecosystem meant replacing hardware along with the app. At the protocol layer, that choice is fading. Within 15 days this fall, Apple and Amazon both shipped new home hardware that acts as a Matter controller and Thread hub, so a Matter-over-Thread lock bought today can pair with either company’s system. Once the accessories become portable, competition moves to the box in the middle: the hub that commissions devices, runs automations, keeps the mesh healthy, and decides which features a household gets to see. The platforms have started spending their engineering there, and the next round of lock-in is likely to come from the hub rather than the hardware around it.

Apple’s HomeView is the clearest example. The display costs $299 and reaches stores November 13, and it serves as a smart home hub, Matter controller, and Thread Border Router for Apple Home and Matter accessories. It launches alongside the Apple Home Collection, a set of cameras, video doorbells, locks, and thermostats developed with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric, arriving from December. Every device in that collection runs on Thread, and because wall-powered Thread devices typically act as router nodes, each camera or thermostat a household adds also strengthens the mesh. Two weeks after Apple’s launch, Amazon introduced an Echo Dot that works as a smart home hub for Zigbee, Thread, and Matter devices, putting the radio stack that once justified a separate bridge into a small speaker. Two major platforms now ship this capability in mainstream hardware, and the accessories on the other side of those radios can increasingly move between them.

The features Apple attached to the Home Collection show where the platforms plan to compete. Matter Alpha’s review of Apple’s product pages found tap-to-pair NFC setup on LG’s thermostat and deadbolt, automatic Wi-Fi credential updates when a household changes its network password, a Thread control path that keeps accessories reachable when Wi-Fi drops, and native tilt controls for LG’s indoor camera inside the Home app. Some of this tracks the standard, since NFC commissioning was one of the additions in Matter 1.6. Matter Alpha couldn’t confirm whether Apple uses the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s version or its own, and the Wi-Fi fallback appears to be a custom Apple Home implementation. Credential syncing had previously been limited to Apple’s own HomePod speakers. Each feature removes a real chore, like re-pairing a thermostat after a router swap. Matter Alpha describes the overall pattern as Apple building exclusive capabilities on top of Matter.

Before Matter was ratified, MistyWest warned that companies could support standard features over Matter while withholding premium ones for their own family of products, backing the standard in name while keeping a walled garden. Its hypothetical was a Ring doorbell that worked with any Matter platform as a doorbell but kept its camera inside Alexa. In late 2024, Gokul B. Naidu described the early symptoms. Households still switched between apps to control different parts of one home, and a Matter light might turn on from Alexa while only another platform could adjust its color or brightness. The 2026 hubs move that split up a layer. The baseline commands (on, off, lock, set a temperature) are shared across platforms. Setup, recovery after a network change, camera control, and device-to-device automation are where experiences diverge, and all of them run through the hub. Matter Alpha hopes Apple contributes these features back to the standard in the next year or two. Until then, Matter sets the floor and each hub decides what sits above it.

For accessory makers, Matter certification now gets a product onto every major hub, so the next advantage comes from supporting the parts of the spec those hubs are starting to expose. NFC commissioning is one. Matter Binding is another: it lets a sensor or wall switch send commands directly to a target device, and bound devices keep talking locally even if the hub goes offline. Apple’s description of LG’s temperature sensor pairing with other Matter-compatible thermostats suggests the Home app is adopting Binding for climate devices, a capability that until now lived mostly inside companion apps from Eve, Aqara, and Inovelli. Building to those features keeps an accessory competitive on whichever hub a customer already owns. For integrators and buyers, the long-term commitment has moved from the accessories to the hub. Locks, sensors, and thermostats bought on Matter and Thread can follow a household to a new platform. The setup shortcuts, automations, and camera features layered on top of them stay with the hub that provided them.

Picture a normal Tuesday morning. A security researcher emails your support inbox to say that attackers are using a flaw in your gateway’s web interface. If that gateway is sold in Europe, your company now has 24 hours to tell the regulators. The deadline is not for fixing the problem, only for reporting it.

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Few know it, but AI labs now let you monetize your company’s operational data. And they're spending $15 billion this year on it. 

Your workflows, documentation, processes, and internal convos like Slack are extremely valuable and they're paying anywhere from $100k to $3 million for it per company.

You might think that sounds scary, but all the data is anonymized before, so no PII is sent over. Bezel (Y combinator backed) helps you partner with a lab that wants to license your data specifically if you have more than 20 employees and have existed longer than a year.

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In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Alper Yegin, CEO of the LoRa Alliance, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss the state of LoRaWAN in 2026. The conversation covers what's driving LoRaWAN adoption, how LoRaWAN compares to other connectivity options, new LoRaWAN capabilities, LoRaWAN deployments in smart buildings and other verticals, moving from a pilot to large-scale deployment, misconceptions about LoRaWAN, the role of LoRaWAN in physical AI, and the future of LoRaWAN.

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