Will Matter finally be able to do what it should have always done?

Matter, the smart home interoperability standard, might finally get a feature that should have been there from day one: a single shared Matter network managed by multiple ecosystems. With this feature, called Joint Fabric, smart devices added to the network will be controllable by any authorized platform — Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and the rest. No need to “share” your smart light between apps; set it up once, and control it everywhere. It’s like your smart home is a joint bank account and your platforms of choice all have signing authority.

Joint Fabric is part of the new Matter 1.6 spec announced this week at Unify, the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s inaugural conference, in Austin, Texas. While there are no new device types in the spec, there are a few quality-of-life updates.

There’s now support for full NFC setup, which eliminates the need to scan the QR code and lets you just tap to pair. With this, you can also pair a device before powering it on — which could be useful when installing smart bulbs or a wired smart switch.

Also new is Thermostat Suggestions, a standardized way for these devices to communicate across ecosystems. It allows an ecosystem to send a time-based “recommendation” that the thermostat can defer or adopt based on input from other platforms.

The idea here is that if you manually change the temperature on one platform, the thermostat will ignore an automated request that arrives a few moments later. Also, your Apple Home automation won’t override a utility savings program you signed up for, and preferences like optimizing for air quality will be recognized across services.

But back to that Joint Fabric thing. Besides sporting a name that fits better in a ’70s road-trip movie than a smart-home standard, Joint Fabric is designed to improve on one of Matter’s core features, multi-admin. This is where you should be able to set up a device in one smart home app and then use it on any other Matter-compatible platform.

Today, each ecosystem creates and manages its own network (called a fabric) and can share devices across them (in a cumbersome way). Joint Fabric creates a single Matter network that Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and so on can all become co-signers on. You add a device once, and it appears across all authorized ecosystems. You can also revoke that authority at any time without losing any of your devices.

This opens a host of possibilities for unifying your smart home as Matter was originally intended. It’s a part of enhanced multi-admin, an ongoing effort to make using devices across multiple ecosystems smoother.

To date, interoperability problems have been one of Matter’s biggest roadblocks — a notable issue for an interoperability standard. It’s not that the CSA hasn’t addressed them; it’s that platforms have been slow to fully adopt new specifications, which can result in incompatibility.

Seamlessly setting up and managing a device once, and having it automatically accessible and up to date on any other platform, was something I thought would be part of Matter when it launched in 2022. When the first spec arrived, I was disappointed to learn this wasn’t how it would work. Back then, I was told Matter didn’t work that way because the platform makers didn’t want it to. Four years later, has that attitude changed?

There was a similar attempt back in Matter 1.4 in 2024 called Fabric Sync, which lets devices set up in one ecosystem be shared to another with just a single authorization. But each platform still runs its own separate network. At the time, the CSA told me that all the big players were actively involved in developing this solution, and it was expected they would implement it over the next year. It’s 2026, and we’re still waiting.

Joint Fabric feels like a much bigger ask than Fabric Sync, and effectively takes control away from the platforms and puts it where it should be: in your hands. My hopes aren’t high that this will see rapid adoption either. I’ll be at the CSA’s Unify conference in Austin this week, and plan to ask the ecosystems about their timeline for implementing Joint Fabric.