00:00.34 James Welcome back everyone to Merge Conflict, your weekly developer podcast. I'm James Montemagno and we have a beautiful sunny island life, Frank Kruger. What's going on? Why are we recording at 9am? 00:10.66 James That's way too early to record a podcast. 00:11.32 Frank It's too bright out as as with all things negative in my life. I blame them on you. So the the glaring sun in my face giving me poor lighting in this room. It's actually really good lighting for me. Bad lighting for you in this room is all your fault because we're recording at a funny time. We usually record at night. This time we're recording during the day. 00:30.55 Frank Tiny bit my fault. 00:30.68 James And you'll never know. 00:31.64 Frank 1% my fault. 00:33.06 James You'll never know where I am at or what time it is because i'm still in the garage. 00:35.19 Frank The cave. 00:35.66 James So a cave. 00:36.11 Frank You're still in the dark cave. That's right. 00:37.88 James Yes. The question is like, well, this is like continue to be stuffed with stuff. You know it's pretty full up. I don't know if we fit any more stuff. So, um yeah. 00:46.09 Frank I have faith in you. 00:47.79 James Well, got two updates before we get into our episode today. Really quick. We're to talk about matter and why it matters. 00:52.60 Frank Okay. Hmm. I like that. 00:55.48 James Yeah. 00:55.56 Frank is that a pun or is that just silly talk? 00:56.15 James Yeah. That is fun. ah ah Both maybe? I don't know. Yeah. I have a, I got two pour out moments. 01:04.16 Frank Ooh. Okay. That's sad. You're sunsetting something. 01:08.46 James I'm not. Apple is. 01:09.90 Frank Oh, Oh, Apple. and What are we sunsetting now? 01:12.18 James yeah 01:13.75 Frank Oh, is it OpenGL again? 01:14.10 James Can we? 01:15.31 Frank They keep saying they're going to do it. 01:17.66 James they may. I don't know. They seem to be ripping stuff out of everything. So we can pour one out for our good friend Rosetta 2. 01:25.46 Frank Oh, oh, OK. That has developer implications. um Fascinating. um Tell me more. Well, that stinks. Have you updated all your apps? 01:37.64 James I have one left that I'm doing right now. And I'll tell you why. 01:41.46 Frank I'm sorry. 01:42.72 James um Why we have that. 01:44.45 Frank OK, so if you're not in the Mac community, Rosetta is the magic piece of software that lets us run, in this case, Rosetta 2, lets you run um Intel x64 code on our fancy ARM64 chips. 01:45.01 James Let me see. 01:57.66 Frank So this has been coming for probably the last five years. um i thought it would last a little longer because Apple still requires that we release fat binaries, fat, chunky binaries that contain both x64 and ARM64, if you've ever released for x sixty four ah This is surprising to me. I think I have a bunch of software still running X64. I think I've ported all my apps, though, too. 02:23.35 James Yeah, this one's fascinating. There's three notes. One, um, it was introduced in 2020. So Mac OS 26.4 users may receive, may receive a system notification when launching apps that rely on Rosetta, alerting them to update to an Apple Silicon native version. 02:39.80 James So if you don't have one, you can't update number two, number two. 02:41.43 Frank Okay. Okay. yeah Hey, developers. 02:45.56 James And it dollars number two, Mac OS 27, the final release to support Rosetta Intel only apps will no longer run on max with Apple Silicon after this update. 02:51.26 Frank Okay. 02:54.63 James So we got about a year and a half. 02:56.98 Frank Yeah, okay, everyone. um If you haven't updated to.NET, what do we, I think.NET 6 started, right? 03:03.96 James Eight, six, five. 03:05.02 Frank eight yeah Anyway, you should be on 10, just get to 10. 03:05.48 James Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 03:08.62 Frank Yeah, update all your apps to.NET 10, geez. ah Scary. 03:11.96 James One footnote, footnote, footnote, please note, please note, there there's a note that Rosetta functionality for older, unmetained gaming titles that rely on Intel-based frameworks will continue to be supported. 03:15.34 Frank I 03:18.98 Frank love it. 03:28.57 Frank Oh, double standards Intel. So the games get a special, what what's going on here? Is there like, it can't even be an entitlement. This is like, cause it's, it's obviously old software. 03:41.72 Frank um 03:41.94 James there's they're They're putting you know ah in in ah and an approved list, right? 03:42.92 Frank Dang. Yeah. 03:45.26 James That's what they're doing is they're like looking at usage of game titles from different platforms that are being used on Mac. 03:50.55 Frank Yeah. 03:51.54 James They don't want to break those users. 03:52.02 Frank ah 03:52.78 James So they're putting in they're putting in ah an okay. 03:55.70 Frank that means rosetta still works that means like there's no technical reason this is purely marketing pushing poor little app developers as ourselves to release our stupid software um i don't mind reasons even when they give like an arbitrary technical reason i'll i'm old enough in my career i'll take arbitrary technical reasons but having no technical reason come on apple come on 03:56.44 James Yep. 04:00.29 James Yep. 04:07.70 James Yes. Pretty crazy. Yeah. 04:18.36 James ah Yeah. Yeah. ah So that one's a good one. So I'm updating my apps now because the other one that I can't, I cannot get proof or not if this is a real pour it out moment, but I do believe it may be a pour it out moment for store kit one. 04:30.37 Frank Okay. 04:37.40 Frank Oh, that's the big one. 04:39.06 James I've, v I've started to get, 04:41.02 Frank Because there's a lot of us still rocking the Storkit one. 04:44.76 James So check your apps. I started to get notifications on my GitHub and in my inbox from customers that says i can no longer purchase things or I can no longer validate my purchases. 04:56.76 James um i haven't gotten too many, but other people are. 04:57.22 Frank Oh, yeah, yeah. 04:59.48 James So if you're using store kit one, Check it out. This is a ah pretty big hit if that's the case. so It may just be an Apple backend problem at this moment, but I am not 100% sure. 05:07.80 Frank Yeah. 05:12.76 James And I can't find a lot of details on it in general. 05:13.70 Frank OK. 05:17.20 Frank You're scaring me. I don't want to pass on FUD. So let's just hope this is a temporary situation, because I think they'd be a little more explicit about this one. But it is scary. um I have subscriptions and basically all my apps rocking the store kit one. 05:31.22 Frank ah Time to get working on a Xamarin plugin, James. 05:35.59 James Yep. Yes, I agree. Yes. So, um check your apps. That's what I'm telling you to do. If you have one, you know, and the documentation is hard, right? 05:42.78 Frank Yeah. 05:44.62 James Because store kit one has been deprecated since iOS 18 and there is not supported, but there's also not supported versus this API is removed. 05:49.51 Frank Yeah. 05:57.43 James Now that being said, the apps do not crash, which is telling me that the API exists because your app would crash if the API was was removed. 05:57.71 Frank Right. 06:07.13 Frank Right. Yeah. 06:08.22 James So this is telling me that something somewhere changed. So, um, the probably better thing to do would be to alert Apple via an Apple radar, which I was probably going to tell people to do in the GitHub issue that people are chatting on. 06:25.59 James Um, But yeah, since the app doesn't crash, I feel as though the API is there. Yeah. 06:31.58 Frank Well, even even if this is not true, it is a reminder to all of us that we're going to have to take some kind of action very soon to get our apps ported over to Storkit 2. 06:44.73 Frank um Might be time to start working on a little library for Maui to support some Storkit 2. 06:44.85 James Yeah. 06:49.59 James I think so. 06:50.93 Frank Yeah, dang. 06:51.54 James I think so. And I'd be down if you, I think if you were to do that, I would be down to put it into my in-app billing plugin and swap, swap a Rooney it out for people and do that work. 06:59.56 Frank Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. 07:01.67 James Um, it's a big work. The thing is I didn't want to do the binding because I don't want to support the binding, but you literally have to do the binding because yeah, exactly. 07:05.08 Frank yeah Findings are terrible. Yeah. 07:09.03 James Yeah. 07:09.29 Frank I make a living off of this stuff, so I need support for it. 07:12.18 James Yeah, exactly. 07:13.33 Frank Yeah. And I think um I would probably do it in two ways. Try to um support the Storkit 2 APIs as closely as possible, but also try to have maybe a little bit of a backwards compatibility layer so we don't have to tear out all of our Storkit 1 code. 07:25.51 James Yeah. 07:27.57 Frank But honestly, i haven't taken that deep of a look at Storkit 2. 07:29.08 James Yeah. 07:31.82 Frank So thank you for the um shots fired. I'm going to have to get on my game here. 07:34.97 James m That said, Storkit 2, much better API. very, it's very, it's very beautiful. And there's tons of beautiful things that you can have a, like native UI that pops up, like that is like showcasing your work and all that. 07:46.71 Frank Yeah. 07:48.30 James So it's there. So anyways, those are my two pour it out moments. 07:50.06 Frank Yeah. 07:51.62 James Um, but let's pour it out for every other protocol in the world of IOT because they no longer matter because matter is. 07:52.28 Frank Pew. this 07:58.36 Frank Oh, wow. Triple pun. That's why it matters. Oh, y'all. 08:05.15 James Oh God, we're so stupid. 08:06.01 Frank Do you remember, I think it was probably, yeah, no, don't vote unsubscribe. 08:07.03 James Unsubscribe, unsubscribe. 08:11.50 Frank um Do you remember years ago, I think when Matter was coming out, it came out, I think around 2022-ish. It was started earlier than that. 08:19.43 James Yep. 08:20.54 Frank But when it came out, I was very dismissive because I think you were mentioning, you're talking about Matter and threads. And I'm just like, oh God, another IoT standard. Just add it to the bin of IoT standards that are... 08:32.50 Frank you know, going to go away or something like that. And I was very uninterested. James, I am proud to report I was completely wrong. I am now a Matter devotee, and I want to spend a podcast and tell you why. I think it's the greatest thing to actually happen at IoT in a long time. And I apologize to all the listeners that it took me this long to come around to the correct side of this argument. 08:56.94 Frank But yeah, let's talk about Matter and why it matters. um So maybe let's start with what do you know about Matter at this point? 09:04.41 James I know that a few of my devices, i think, got it. Like, I think Apple, I think the Apple TV has some matter or something. 09:10.10 Frank awesome 09:15.35 James And then also like my, those lights that were behind me got matter or maybe they got thread or maybe thread is matter. That's about it. I mean, from my understood understanding, 09:28.02 James You know, in the IoT world, there is the mostly standardized protocol is Wi-Fi, which is not really a protocol. I mean, it is a protocol, but it's not really it is a probe it's not an protocol, right? 09:35.83 Frank It is a protocol. Yeah. 09:40.31 Frank Right. 09:41.29 James It's protocol. It's enough. And then there was Zigbee, which was very popular. 09:43.51 Frank Yeah. Yeah. 09:45.10 James And I have a bunch of Zigbee devices. So I mostly know things about Zigbee because that was kind of ah And Z-Wave, those two were kind of interchangeable in a way. 09:51.41 Frank Mm-hmm. 09:52.54 James um And those are the two that I knew, but those those have been out for like ever. 09:52.77 Frank Yeah. Competing standards. 09:56.45 James So I think Matter and Thread and all that stuff, I kind of in my ah mind envision in it as like a next generation of those ah things that would be maybe hopefully... 10:07.10 James ah more approved by more companies? Because that was kind of like the problem is fighting standards. You have too many standards. 10:13.35 Frank Yeah. 10:13.33 James Does everything support everything? Is it going to support everything? Then a consumer goes, okay, I got to go to the store. Do I got to get a Wi-Fi, a Zigbee, a Z-Wave? 10:21.62 Frank Yeah. 10:22.57 James What ecosystem am I adopting here and which one's going to die tomorrow? So... 10:27.64 Frank Yeah. I mean, you're not wrong on basically any of that, but the, which one's going to die tomorrow, I think is the one why I was dismissive at first. Cause you get tired of chasing these things. 10:39.86 Frank um So it's, it's not a transport. um So OSI has a networking layer stack where they talk about like, I'm going to simplify. there's There's like seven layers to the OSI model of networking. 10:53.92 Frank There's way too many layers. But in in my world, it's easier if you just think about the two important ones for ah developers like us are there is the transport, the thing that's actually making the communications happen. 10:55.54 James like an onion. 11:07.78 Frank And then there's the application layer, which is our HTTPS and our you know all the all the junk we put on top of TCP um to actually do communications. 11:18.27 Frank So, Matter is a protocol for talking to IoT devices, but it's at the application layer. So, actually has nothing to do with the physical stuff. 11:26.84 James Oh. Hmm. 11:28.50 Frank It actually runs on Wi-Fi, technically Ethernet, but who cares about Ethernet? It runs on Wi-Fi and IP version 6. So, it's an IP 6 protocol. 11:41.85 Frank That basically is a lot like HTTP. It's an application level something. This is great for developers because it means any idiot can write a matter device because all you got to be able to do is talk, um, 11:58.32 Frank basically sockets. You have to know how to use sockets. You can write yourself a Matter device. And this is a big deal because the other ones that you mentioned like ZigBee and Z-Wave, those are actually transport protocols. Those are mesh networking. Those are radio frequencies and framing and all the all the complicated stuff you don't actually want to deal with. 12:21.14 Frank And those were super annoying because they were proprietary. Zigbee, you had to go get registered trademark Zigbee, pay them a licensing fee, all that kind of nonsense. Whereas Matter, just sitting at the application layer, is it's free for anyone to adopt. 12:37.70 Frank And this is the big deal. But just while we're doing definitions, I'll get to Thread does run Matter, but it's up at the transport level. Right. 12:46.68 James Oh, okay. 12:46.99 Frank So Thread is a replacement for the Z-Waves and the ZigBees that require like special hubs and all that kind of stuff. 12:47.52 James Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. guy 12:52.45 James Ah, 12:54.55 Frank So Thread is a mesh networking protocol or transport, whatever. i hate layers. It's up there in the layers. Whereas Matter is actually just kind of the developer focused. 13:05.41 Frank um just just Just talk these text streams and you can make something happen. So that's layering. Don't you love layering? 13:13.66 James I see. So, okay. So I'm a developer, James, and i have an app that's like, you know, my cadence, or I, you know, maybe have a phone app, or maybe i have a little device that I want to connect to different devices, little sensors, and i want to connect to them. 13:18.01 Frank Hi, James. Yeah. Mm-hmm. 13:32.76 James So today in the world, I'd probably use like Bluetooth, right? So like pair and read data, and do all this stuff. 13:39.33 Frank Mm-hmm. 13:39.42 James And then I would have a device that's like blue Bluetooth. but you're saying in this world, I, James developer could create hardware that has like the matter protocol. That's like emitting the data off of matter. And then I could have an application that's reading that data off of matter locally, basically. Is that correct? 14:02.74 Frank Yeah, but in the case of Matter, you basically have like one controller um and then lots of little devices talking Matter. 14:08.18 James Hmm. 14:11.78 Frank So it doesn't have to be exactly this way, but you know one physical device, like let's say a light bulb, is just sitting there ready to turn on and off. and that's a and in our normal parlance that's like a little client and then you have a little controller a big controller like let's say an amazon dingus device or an apple tv or a google whatever the heck they're selling these days eero and all that kind of stuff so you have those kind of controllers out there and if i make a little light bulb 14:37.04 James Yeah. 14:44.60 Frank Then, and if I make that little light bulb talk the matter protocol, then all those big dinguses like Apple Home and Amazon can talk to it. And it's usually to control it. 14:56.06 Frank In the case of a light bulb, turn it on and off. In the case of a switch, turn it on and off for a door lock. Lock and unlock it for a door. 15:02.62 James yeah 15:02.94 Frank Open and close it. You know, that kind of stuff. It's usually you using some kind of dingus to control a device. 15:11.42 James I see. 15:11.58 Frank But, yeah. 15:11.82 James Gotcha. Yeah. So like today, for example, like in the house, there's, i for all intents purposes, have my my router. It's sitting there plugged into my router. i have a Eufy security station that's sitting there that is connected to Ethernet, but then it implements like HomeKit and Google Home and some of the cameras support it. 15:32.76 Frank moving 15:33.22 James Some of them don't. maybe you can connect to Wi-Fi. And then I also have like a Govi gateway to connect to my water sensors. And that is like the the Govi gateway is connected to Wi-Fi, but then the Govi sensors are like some proprietary connection mechanism. 15:40.77 Frank Oh, yeah. OK. 15:47.54 Frank Oh, yeah. 15:48.64 James And then I also have SwitchBot gateway and the SwitchBot gateway enables me to do the the open and close like a light that isn't a smart switch or like maybe like 15:49.02 Frank Sure. 15:58.81 James turn on different lights. But that again is like connected to the Wi-Fi, but then like connecting via some of its own proprietary thing. 16:00.60 Frank Yeah. 16:06.18 James So I basically just have like a thousand gateways sitting around. And then I also have a Zigbee gateway that's like for Zigbee devices. 16:10.30 Frank Yeah. Yeah. Right. 16:13.40 James Although that Zigbee gateway is actually proprietary only for Sinope devices, even though they are Zigbee, but it's only going to accept certain things from their gateway. 16:16.97 Frank Yep. 16:23.14 James And then I also have an Apple home, which is also an I have an Apple TV, which is an Apple home kit hub in which some of the cameras will connect to that. 16:23.85 Frank IOT is terrible. 16:29.95 Frank Yeah. Hub. 16:34.14 James And then i give up basically but that I think this is the, so by the way, this is the average consumer home and like you and me also, i think if Frank described his home network, by the way, I'm pretty sure it's just like a bunch of gateways and wifi. 16:34.49 Frank Oh my God. Yeah. ah 16:40.53 Frank Yeah. 16:47.21 James And I didn't even mention the devices that are just like ah Wi-Fi, like my my lights here in my office, their Wi-Fi connected to so to something. 16:50.67 Frank Yeah. 16:54.47 James I have no idea. I can but barely get them to work. 16:55.65 Frank It's something. 16:57.18 James And then they're like, only 2.4 gigs. And then I have this like lock on the door that like wasn't, didn't want to connect for all to the 2.4 gig only connect network. 17:04.79 Frank Ugh. 17:07.05 James And it only wanted to connect to the combined network. And i'm like what are you doing? But then the other stuff is connected. And I'm like, what is going on here? 17:12.79 Frank Yeah. 17:13.78 James That's that's my life basically, Frank. 17:15.99 Frank Yeah, and honestly, it's still it's still the state of the art. 17:16.33 James That's the average consumer's life. 17:20.04 Frank I think most homes are like that. 17:20.97 James Yeah. 17:21.72 Frank Mine's not, by the way. Mine's a lot cleaner. But um we are in this terrible situation where we have a meet a million competing implementations of roughly the same thing. 17:23.83 James and 17:31.42 Frank So I've been buying Wi-Fi hardware for a while because Wi-Fi is good enough. I don't exactly need the meshing stuff. Mesh is better because, you know, you get longer range and all that kind of stuff. And they're relaying messages. But Wi-Fi is good. Wi-Fi is good. But we have this problem of at least in the Amazon Dingus app, um you go to add a light bulb. 17:53.40 Frank There used to be a list of like 10 manufacturers. Now that list is like a thousand long. It breaks every UI paradigm ever. 18:01.94 James Yeah. 18:02.07 Frank Do not make become a hardware company that starts with a letter Z or else your customers will never, ever be able to connect any of your devices. 18:10.78 James Yeah. 18:11.35 Frank And so I have a lot of like ah Amazon switches, Amazon basic switches, and they all talk some random proprietary Wi-Fi protocol. That's not so bad because I already have the Amazon dingus. 18:21.99 Frank But what's really bad is when you get a random Wi-Fi protocol that requires its own app and then you got to create an account in that app and then you got to pair that app to. 18:29.96 James That's my life. 18:31.40 Frank Oh, my God, I hate that. 18:31.85 James Do I, I, I got the, I got the, the folder it's called smart devices and it's like, I got, I got six apps for six different things. 18:37.46 Frank Yeah. 18:40.94 James Like we have like on the coast, like the dehumidifiers. I got like, I got like an anchor app. I got, I got a, uh, uh, the water sprinkler in this house. 18:47.03 Frank Yeah. 18:49.78 Frank Yeah. 18:49.78 James The water sprinkler system has its own separate app just to turn on and off and schedule that. 18:53.17 Frank Of course. 18:54.09 James Let's see. I got the Echo Bee app. 18:54.81 Frank Sure. 18:55.96 James I got the Hue app. 18:56.51 Frank Mm-hmm. 18:56.88 James I got the Google Home app. I have, the there's a, in this place, there's there's a, the the oven has Wi-Fi. I don't know why, but you can turn, you can turn on and off the oven because why not? 19:04.52 Frank Oh, excellent. 19:08.52 James Let's see. 19:08.60 Frank If you want to tempt fate. 19:08.68 James I have a Dyson app so I can connect to, so I can connect to my vacuums for some ungodly reason. 19:12.58 Frank Vacuum. Yeah. 19:13.91 James I have the Segway mobility app for the e-scooter because why not? Let's see what else I have. 19:18.23 Frank Yeah. 19:18.47 James I have, ah and then I, so that's just in my hidden folder that I don't use. And then I also have the smart home app, which is the dehumidifiers, the control center for these lights, the Sinope for the heaters, the Govi for the water sensors, the Eufy for the Eufy, the Switchbots for the Switchbots. 19:22.74 Frank Right. 19:29.52 Frank It's ridiculous. 19:31.78 James And they're all controlled in that way. 19:32.41 Frank Yeah. 19:33.42 James And hardly any of them actually support HomeKit accordingly. 19:38.16 Frank Right. 19:38.61 James You know what I mean? 19:39.22 Frank Right. So in an ideal world, every single one of those manufacturers will now implement Matter and expose standardized endpoints to the Matter system, whatever. 19:48.23 James Yeah. 19:53.25 Frank It's just Wi-Fi. It's just broadcasting junk everywhere. 19:56.12 James Yeah. 19:56.76 Frank And ideally, you don't need a million apps. I mean, in one way, it's bad because I'm i'm begging for everything to be smushed all into the Amazon app or the Google app or the Apple Home app. 20:07.67 James Totally. 20:09.05 Frank But you know what? Those are the companies I trust. I don't trust some random hardware manufacturer to write a good app because most of them write terrible apps. um I have um this Smart Life app I think I use for a lot of things that use these old Wi-Fi protocols. And that app is terrible. 20:26.20 Frank And I'm just stuck with it forever. ah So i think Matter is good because it's just a simple Wi-Fi protocol that everyone can implement. 20:37.02 Frank It's standardized. So all the big players can write to it. And you won't need to create accounts on every single fly-by-night manufacturer out there. 20:44.78 James Yeah. 20:47.89 Frank So I'm a big proponent. Go out there. when When you're buying new hardware, look for the Matter logo and get that. I've become a total shill for Matter. 20:56.40 James Yeah. 20:57.59 Frank But it's not just because um I want to simplify my home networking. It's because I like building my own devices. James, you know that. 21:06.39 James Yeah. 21:06.78 Frank I love building little IoT garbage things, all sorts of things. 21:07.42 James yeah 21:11.83 Frank And let me tell you the terrible state things were at before. So let's say I wanted to create a light bulb. This is always the simplest example, but you can imagine more complicated things that I want to create. 21:23.29 Frank You know what I did in the past to be Amazon dingus compatible? Do you remember? I think I've said it on this podcast before. Do you remember my trick? 21:31.90 James No, I don't remember. Was it that you like, no, remember. Just tell me. 21:35.90 Frank I always pretend to be a Philips Hughes bulb because, 21:39.75 James That's what it is. I was like, I was like, I bet you're spoofing something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 21:42.87 Frank yeah, spoofing. Spoofing Philips Hughes because um that protocol was reverse engineered. It's not like it was a complicated protocol or anything, but you know you have to figure out how all this stuff works. 21:53.43 Frank And thank goodness there was no security model there actually verifying, like, did you have an actual Philips certificate or anything like that? It was just a nice little, it's not even a back door, but a little side door to get into the Dingus ecosystem. 22:04.63 James Yeah. 22:07.28 Frank So all my little devices could be controlled by the big players out there. Well, I went to go do that just a few months ago, and all a sudden, they closed that side door. 22:19.51 Frank They were not accepting my little devices anymore. 22:19.60 James Yeah. 22:24.00 Frank And I got depressed because I loved it. Like, yeah, everything shows up as a light bulb, even though it's not. You know, I had door opener and closers, locks. I had a refrigerator turn on and offers, you know, everything. 22:33.08 James yeah 22:36.32 Frank um I even had my thermostat acting as a light bulb. So you would say, like, turn the house to... 22:40.34 James Nice. 22:43.53 Frank 80% and that would turn the house to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Don't do that. It's too hot. 22:48.52 James That's funny. 22:48.63 Frank But it worked because the Philp's Hughes was dimmable. 22:49.24 James That's funny. Yeah. 22:51.35 Frank Yeah. So, you know, you could transmit a number to it. 22:51.99 James Yeah. I like that. That's great. 22:54.35 Frank Worked great. 22:56.07 James I love that. That's a good hack. 22:57.14 Frank What a hack, right? 22:57.43 James Yeah. It's not just on off people. It's also numbers. Yeah. And probably color schemes that you could like detect for whatever those are coming through too, which is hilarious. 23:00.34 Frank Yeah, exactly. 23:05.30 Frank Well, temperatures, but those are color temperatures. You don't want to set the house to 1600 Kelvin. You just don't. It's going to be too warm. I promise. ah But what's cool is because Matter is just some idiot protocol out there that anyone who knows how to program sockets can do. 23:13.26 James That's great. 23:21.57 Frank And obviously there's libraries out there. And I hope we'll link to some of the libraries to make this easy. ah You can start implementing standardized endpoints. So a part of the Matter protocol is they... 23:34.67 Frank it's It's actually a bit of an open-ended protocol where you have like clusters and things that can have, like it supports this command and that command. But really you want to be in the happy profile world where you are a switch or you're a button or you're a door. I'm giving all the basic examples, but there's like 30 of these profiles out there that'll probably cover your user scenario. 23:56.78 James Yeah. Oh, cool. 23:57.08 Frank And instead of pretending to be a Philips Hue bulb, I can actually be the correct kind of device. And so when you pair it to an Apple Home or a Google, whatever the heck, ah you get the correct kind of UI for it. So instead of, you know, setting a percentage dimmable feature to turn the temperature in my house, I can actually be a thermostat. And it knows, okay, thermostats do temperature. So you get the correct user interface for it. You get better voice commands for it because I don't have to say set the thermostat to 10%. Don't. 24:30.10 James hu 24:30.68 Frank Why do I keep coming up with bad examples for temperatures? 24:31.28 James Yeah. 24:32.96 Frank I really do live at normal temperatures, people. I do, I swear. 24:35.41 James Okay. 24:36.06 Frank ah You can now say set the temperature to, you know, this thing. 24:36.15 James Okay. 24:39.42 Frank Or I've hooked up my garage door. So now I can say open the garage door, not set the garage door to 100%. Set the garage door to 0%. Is... 24:50.14 James And you don't know which one is that, right? 24:50.74 Frank is 24:52.22 James Is 0% open or closed? 24:52.62 Frank No, never. 24:53.54 James yeahs Yeah, who knows? 24:54.79 Frank And there was no feedback mechanism, too, because the Philips Hue bulb never really had to transmit its state back to the thing. 25:00.92 James Yeah, I could have done open the, uh, to set the garage door to green for open, set it to to red for, stop yeah. 25:01.94 Frank So I. 25:05.46 Frank Yeah, exactly. 25:09.78 Frank Now you're getting my life. So your life is weird because you have a million manufacturers. 25:11.78 James Yeah. 25:14.14 Frank My life is weird because I have a million custom DIY devices hooked up to my networks. 25:19.22 James i love it. 25:19.80 Frank and i I can never remember how to talk to them. But it's nice because Matter actually supports um both directions, like state updates. So I can create smart buttons. 25:28.40 James Hmm. 25:30.55 Frank And so that's actually transmitting data to the devices. And then you can start adding triggers to them. So sorry, i'm I'm in the Amazon world. So in the Amazon app, you can say when this button is pressed, take these actions. 25:40.15 James yeah 25:44.46 Frank It's like the old if this, then that kind of stuff. 25:44.70 James Do these things. 25:46.78 Frank I'm sure Apple Home and Google Home have that too. 25:46.86 James That's cool. 25:50.01 Frank But so ah Matter, I love Matter because it's an open protocol. Anyone can implement it. You don't need to pay any fees or anything. you actually get good profiles for all your DIY devices, and those devices can actually transmit data to the dingus. 26:07.38 Frank Pretty cool, right? 26:09.26 James That's awesome. Is that, um what's the home the home assistant? They have that home the hub, home assistant. If you don't know home assistant, we people have talked about it for a while on the pod. 26:20.60 James you know, we're talking about these hubs home assistant is sort of a bring everything to your app type of thing, right? 26:20.70 Frank Yeah. 26:25.53 James So imagine you're not in one of these ecosystems, you're like, well, how do I do it? 26:25.64 Frank Yeah. yeah' 26:28.79 James So they actually have, I think now multiple pieces of hardware, but you run it yourself. 26:33.75 Frank Yeah. 26:34.71 James So you don't need external servers and they sell a little box that is called the home assistant green. The question I have, urge is it a matter device? 26:44.82 Frank Yeah. 26:47.06 Frank I think you can just put it on a Raspberry Pi too, though, if you just want to go that route. Because... 26:51.63 James I'm saying, Frank, I'm not you. 26:51.96 Frank Mm-hmm. 26:54.49 James i 26:54.81 Frank Okay, fine. You want to buy a piece of hardware, fine. 26:57.66 James Okay, i says it says, okay, so expand the capabilities. You can add Home Assistant Connect ZBT2 to control Zigbee and Thread devices. Set up Home Assistant Cloud for voice assistants integrate third-party devices. 27:08.09 Frank Okay. 27:12.29 James So my assumption is that this little adapter is a, ah with Zigbee or Thread. 27:17.02 Frank But you don't even need that. Yeah, you don't need that. 27:20.01 James Cause you need a hub. 27:20.47 Frank That's only if you want to do the hardware protocol. 27:20.73 James I'm saying if you don't have an Apple TV, well, I'm saying like, what, if what if you don't have a, a dingus? 27:22.59 Frank Yeah, so... 27:27.48 Frank You probably do have a dingus because your computer talks IP6, Wi-Fi IP6. Most likely you already support Matter. And it's amazing if you go to like the Wikipedia or you go to the Matter website for the actual controllers out there, chances are you have a Matter capable computer because a dingus because all it has to do is talk Wi-Fi and IP6. 27:39.14 James Hmm. 27:47.93 James Hmm. 27:53.25 James Okay. 27:54.04 Frank So chances are you already support it. 27:54.35 James Oh, interesting. 27:57.63 James Hmm. 27:57.85 Frank um And it's true for basically all the old devices. You have to go pretty far back in time to find a device that doesn't support it because it's such a simple application layer. 28:08.64 Frank Now, the device you're talking about, that talks the new transport layer, the new mesh networking. 28:09.30 James That's cool. 28:13.52 Frank So Zigbee was like a proprietary mesh networking. 28:14.10 James Oh. Yeah. 28:17.44 Frank Threads is the open standard mesh networking. So if you want to do mesh, cool. You don't want to flood your Wi-Fi channels, cool, bro. ah You can switch everything to thread. 28:27.80 Frank But I'm more interested in the Matter side, the application programming side, that just all it needs is Wi-Fi and most things already support it already. So even your oldest Amazon dingus probably already talks it. 28:37.73 James Okay. 28:41.98 James Interesting. 28:42.30 Frank Plus, plus it um it helps with some other things too. 28:43.14 James Okay. 28:46.76 Frank So one thing I always hated about when I created an IoT device was I had to know my Wi-Fi password and Wi-Fi name because, yeah, the device has to boot up and has to get that. 28:54.71 James Always. 28:58.52 Frank So one very cool part about using the Matter SDKs and the Matter support is they have onboarding. So it will use, um well, the end effect, the the end user experience is very simple. 29:04.80 James Ah. 29:11.25 Frank You print out a QR code. You go to the Apple Home app or the Google Home app, you scan the QR code, wait for 20 progress bars to go by, and all a sudden, the device is on the Wi-Fi, and it's paired, and all the security stuff has been taken care of for you. 29:29.37 Frank So they have really smooth onboarding. Now, at the transport level, that's happening over Bluetooth. And I think NFC is actually supported also. 29:40.63 Frank But that means, sorry, let me just interrupt. 29:40.60 James Interesting, you know. yeah. 29:43.73 Frank i I was never able to make devices for friends because I would have to hard code their Wi-Fi stuff in there. 29:43.70 James Yeah. go ahead 29:51.48 James yeah 29:51.64 Frank Now I can make a device, print a QR code and be like, here you go, qr code that it'll connect to your network, all super secure. 29:59.32 James The security cameras actually have this functionality now built in. So maybe they're talking over some of this mattery stuff or maybe something different. I don't know what they're doing. But basically, the security cameras like in the app, it'll be like, oh, just like, here's a QR code. 30:12.96 James And you have the camera scan the QR code and just like registers. 30:15.35 Frank Yes. 30:15.99 James It's doing something different. Who knows? But sounds similar. And like, that's a very seamless process. 30:19.29 Frank On border. Yeah. 30:20.50 James Yeah, previously, yeah for the onboarding process of the device, you would have to like, 30:28.02 Frank It was ugly, I know. 30:28.07 James bring the device over, you'd care to it, you would do the thing, you would reboot. And then they did this weird thing for a while where it was like some of the devices, it would send like subsonic messages that would like broadcast. 30:39.80 Frank Oh, geez. Sweet. 30:41.10 James It was like, so like this, 30:41.82 Frank Love it. 30:44.70 James It'd be like, oh, okay. Like you need to connect the device. And, but like, I would go set up the device like out, like put it up. And then it's like, device within five feet the hub. 30:52.09 Frank Yeah. Yeah. 30:55.61 James And you're like, bro, it's outside 50 feet away. 30:56.44 Frank yeah 30:58.53 James What am I supposed to do? Like, I gotta go climb this tree to get this camera down. I would. And bring it close. like, oh my God. There was one where I was like, it was a hardwired one. And like, it was a pain in the butt to get up. So I literally, it was like, I opened the window and I was like, I got the cord as long as it could. 31:14.18 James And I was like, please hear each other. i was like, please just, it was like, I'm like, oh what are you doing? was terrible onboarding experience. I'm already experienced like the worst. It's just like, whatever. 31:22.15 Frank Yeah. 31:23.30 James Yeah, that's cool. 31:23.86 Frank Yeah. And and ah even, even the old tech, like ah even the Roomba onboarding is bad. Like you got to manually switch to their wifi. It does a bounce and a bounce and a bounce. 31:31.68 James Yep. 31:32.86 Frank And you're like, what is going on? 31:33.78 James Mm-hmm. 31:34.42 Frank And eventually it works. I mean, it usually does work, but it's, it's an ugly experience, but now I can tell you I've. 31:37.53 James It does work. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just... i just I just did it yesterday. I did it yesterday when I needed to switch the the wifi, of this go V hub. 31:44.38 Frank Hmm. This is. 31:47.26 James And it's literally like, okay, like open the app. It's like, press this button. And then it's like, connect cool. Connecting via Bluetooth. You're like, cool. It's like what wifi password and what wife. And then it's like, I need your location to get all your wifi's. And it's like, now what password is it? Okay, cool. 32:01.90 James It's like, all right, I got it in the app. So it's got it in the app. And then then once it's gotten the app, it's like, cool, go. 32:04.93 Frank Yeah. 32:07.51 James connect to the Wi-Fi of that device that it's not doing. 32:09.59 Frank Right. 32:09.75 James It's like, okay, cool. was like, cool. I got it. The device is like, cool. The device now is transmitting it. The device is going to reboot. And they're like, cool. Quickly switch back to your other Wi-Fi really quick so then we can finish the process. 32:17.98 Frank Right. 32:19.74 James Like, what is even happening right now? It is a, I know what's happening under the hood, right? 32:24.21 Frank Yeah. 32:24.38 James Because it's like, it's that they need to put that information in the Buddha process or whatever that's it's doing. i was like, this is ridiculous. It's just like, and that's, you know, that that's kind of like average consumer. 32:32.22 Frank yeah 32:35.06 James Like they got to go figure that out. It's not fun. 32:36.54 Frank hand Nope. And now it's just stare at the spinner for 20 to 30 seconds because it's still it's still doing all of that. 32:43.06 James Yeah. Yeah. 32:44.88 Frank It's just doing it automatically now. 32:47.19 James yeah 32:48.60 Frank Because, I mean, it still needs to transfer the Wi-Fi credentials to the device and store those away and blah, blah, blah, test out that connection before it says everything is golden. 32:54.84 James Yeah. 32:58.08 Frank But... um I've built 10, 20 of these things already and it's been flawless so far. I just print out a QR code for each one. 33:05.11 James Nice. 33:06.77 Frank The QR code is pretty static even when I try like different versions and change things around. i think it might be tied to like the Ethernet address or something of the device. um So now whenever I have like a little device I put it on, i just print out the QR code and I can easily repair it and reset it for all the different scenarios. 33:15.59 James Hmm. 33:24.70 Frank So like it sounds like a small feature, but that's actually kind of a big feature just to smooth out that onboarding part. 33:24.74 James Nice. 33:29.24 James Oh, totally. 33:32.09 Frank ah So it's coming up all wins. I do want to mention a negative is um there is still a licensing fee. If you want to be like a real vendor and actually sell these things, then you do have to go spend some money to the Matter Consortium, whatever they're called these days. 33:50.55 Frank um I think it's like a yearly fee to get like a vendor ID. And so you can put the Matter logo on your devices and all that kind of stuff. 33:58.14 James Yeah. 33:59.63 Frank Alternatively, so all my devices come up with like, my name is vendor underscore test. 33:59.72 James Yeah. 34:05.02 Frank You know what? It's a great name for a company. I think I might go register that name, vendor underscore test. And it's fine. i don't care because it doesn't show up anywhere else in the apps. 34:15.63 Frank It's only when you're pairing. They're like, do you trust vendor underscore test? Like, of course I trust vendor underscore test. Who else could it possibly be? 34:21.37 James Yeah, it's like ah it's like in installing like a Mac or Windows app. 34:21.89 Frank Yeah. 34:25.14 James It's like, are you sure? you Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm just like whatever this random developer test at five, four, three, two, whatever is. Yeah, that's great. 34:32.10 Frank Uh-huh. Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. 34:34.26 James Yeah, that's fine. I trust you. I trust you. 34:36.61 Frank Honestly, I trust that more than I trust just creating a random account on some random manufacturer's app that I haven't seen before. 34:42.73 James Oh, yeah. 34:44.18 Frank So I just want to say um I'm in love. This is the greatest thing that's happened to me because I'm just i'm i'm matterifying like everything. I bought this $7 lamp at basically like the Goodwill. 34:56.73 Frank I put a matter device in it. Now I can turn the lamp on and off. good Because um I show these chips on basically every episode now, but I've got these like little SB32s that I keep um purchasing because they're $4. 34:59.83 James Nice. 35:09.31 Frank They got the Wi-Fi stack on them. 35:12.10 James wild. 35:12.59 Frank They've got the Bluetooth, so the onboarding goes very smooth. They're very tiny. They even have a battery interface. So it's like trivial to hook these up to every kind of device. $4 and you can IoT basically anything you got. 35:26.30 Frank and in a compatible way that can talk to all your dinguses. 35:26.39 James cool. 35:30.68 Frank and Then I'll just end on this note. Because we have things like button interfaces where you can transmit data to like all your dinguses, imagine like you can put an AI on here now. 35:43.22 Frank What if an AI had a tool called like press the button? So now you can do some really interesting things of having the ah little dinguses or the little devices talking to their own AIs and having their own kind of smart triggers and that kind of stuff. 35:55.52 James cool. 35:57.82 Frank all All properly secured, all through correct channels supported in many different apps. So there is light at the end of this IoT t tunnel. 36:08.71 James I like it. Lots of possibilities. You know, I do think that that's like one of the big game changers, right? is actually being able to get these little tiny devices and actually have standard protocols, but then also not have to fake it to make it to actually just get into your own ecosystem, just in your house for yourself. 36:21.12 James Like it's kind of like that, know, right to repair, right to IOT. 36:23.77 Frank Yeah. 36:24.45 James That's what I say. 36:25.75 Frank and The right to IOT. That's a, okay. 36:27.99 James Yeah. 36:28.19 Frank Subtitle. Why Matter Matters? 36:29.37 James Subtitle right to IOT. 36:29.88 Frank The right to IOT. t 36:32.13 James I like it. All right. Well, thanks for going through this. 36:33.17 Frank That's it. 36:33.78 James I'm going to i'm going to give it a try. We'll put some links to everything in the show notes. I'll actually do that, I swear. um Frank sent over a very nice Apple note with all the links. 36:39.29 Frank listen 36:40.94 James I will go and add those on there as well. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. let us know if you're matterifying, threatifying, IoT-ifying your house. It's always fun to have an IoT episode. And if you've ported out for any of the Rosetta apps that you still have running on your Mac. 36:53.56 James So that's going to do it for this week's Merge Conflict. So until next time, I'm James. want to be now. 36:57.88 Frank And I'm Frank Kruger. 37:01.67 James Peace.