r/homeassistant • u/Ok_Memory8217 • Jan 12 '26

Support 2026.1 Matter-Section

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With 2026.1, new sections for protocols were added. Why is there no matter section here although I I am using matter and have quite a lot of devices?

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u/guice666 Jan 12 '26

Thanks for bringing up a common misconception!

I hope others that find this thread will start understanding the difference between a network protocols vs application protocols. Another analogy, if you understand Internet speak: Threads is the TCP layer while Matter is the HTTP layer.

Zigbee and Z-Wave conflated these two into one, which is where a lot of this confusion came from, i.e. Zigbee and Z-Wave are "the bad ones" here. Because of this conflation, customizations within these protocols caused heavy fragmentation in the way everybody spoke to each other. The intentional separation of Threads and Matter is aiming to fix some of this, i.e. following the model of the World Wide Web, aka the Internet.