You can now link Matter accessories to Apple’s Home app and use them in your smart home. But how do you know which devices are connected to Matter? Fortunately, you can easily find out which devices connect to your hub via Matter on an iPhone, iPad or Mac.
Are you not yet familiar with Matter? We would then like to briefly explain what exactly this is. Matter is best thought of as a communications protocol used in smart home devices to enable interactions between different brands and products. It aims to provide a standardized approach for connecting and operating various smart devices within a home ecosystem.
Use matter
Various accessories and devices with Matter support are already available on the market. For example, we have already tested the smart Christmas lights from Nanoleaf and Nuki Smart Lock 4.0 Pro. Both devices have support for Matter. This ensures that you can easily connect the accessories to a Smart Home hub from different brands.
The biggest advantage of Matter is that once a device is suitable for this protocol, you can use it in multiple smart homes. For example, not only Apple offers support for Matter with HomeKit, but also Google, Homey, Amazon and other smart home platforms. In addition, all these devices can also communicate with each other, even if they are linked to different hubs.
You must configure a home hub to add Matter accessories to the Home app. Matter accessories that require Thread require a Thread-enabled home hub, such as HomePod mini, HomePod 2nd Gen, or Apple TV 4K (3rd Gen) Wi-Fi + Ethernet, or a supported third-party Border router.
Check connected Matter accessories
- Open Settings on your iPhone or iPad
- Navigate to ‘General’
- Tap ‘Matter Accessories’
- Select an item from the list
You can then check the device name, serial number, and connected utility. The latter is the most interesting, because it allows you to find out whether the device is connected to your desired Matter hub.
All accessories and devices on this list can be added to apps and features that support Matter. You can give permission for this separately.
Unfortunately, you cannot open this list on a Mac. You can, however, click on the three dots at the top via the Home app to open the Home settings. Then select ‘Connected features’ to view the list of connected Matter accessories.
Secured via iCloud Keychain
Paired Matter accessories sync via iCloud Keychain, regardless of which device or app you used to set them up. Link keys stored in iCloud Keychain are end-to-end encrypted. No one else can see or read this data on the device itself or as it is sent.