DAVIS, May 8 — If your robot vacuum or your motorized blinds still need their own app, the fix now exists on paper. The Connectivity Standards Alliance circulated a working draft of Matter 1.5 to member companies on Thursday, and it adds three device classes the smart-home standard has lacked: robot vacuums, motorized window coverings and air-quality monitors. The Alliance is targeting ratification in the third quarter.
This is the first look at 1.5 since version 1.4 was finalized in March. That release brought energy-management, camera and doorbell device classes plus a reworked multi-admin commissioning flow, and member companies called it the largest expansion of device coverage the standard had seen. Version 1.5 is narrower, aimed at a short list of remaining gaps that happen to matter commercially. (Our March report on Matter 1.4 covers the earlier release.)
The three new device classes, side by side
| Device class | What the draft specifies |
|---|---|
| Robot vacuum | Choosing a cleaning mode, sending the unit back to its dock, setting no-go zones, reporting battery state. Works with lidar-mapping and gyroscope-only navigation alike, with no vendor-specific extensions needed for either. |
| Motorized window covering | Position reporting in 1-percent steps, tilt control for venetian-style slats, and a scheduled-operation cluster that plugs into existing Matter scenes. |
| Air quality | Readings for particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, plus a general “indoor-air-quality index” attribute that can combine sensor types. |
Member companies said the window-covering class leans heavily on the Zigbee Window Covering cluster, which several manufacturers already ship behind proprietary bridges. Reusing that work is one reason the class looks mature at the draft stage.
Why these three
For Tobias Andriessen-Park, a senior product manager at SmartThings who sits on the Matter steering committee, the vacuum and shade classes address the most visible broken promises in the standard.
“Robot vacuums and motorized shades are the two categories where the ‘works with everything’ promise has been most visibly broken for the longest time,” Andriessen-Park told Consumer Tech Wire. “1.5 is the release where we close those. The air-quality device class is the one I’d watch — it’s a smaller installed base, but it’s the category where Matter starts to compete directly with the standalone manufacturer apps that have not had a real reason to integrate before now.”
The calendar from here
- May to July: member companies review the working draft.
- September: ratification is targeted for the CSA member meeting.
- June, meanwhile: a Matter 1.5 developer preview runs alongside the already scheduled Matter 1.4 developer event in Seattle.
- First quarter of 2027, at the earliest: member companies said firmware that complies with 1.5 is unlikely to reach devices before then.
That last date is the one buyers should hold onto. Cassandra Mukherjee-Olafsson, an analyst at the smart-home research firm Telemark, cautioned against shopping by specification number.
“Every Matter release has to be evaluated on the deployment lag, not the spec lag,” she said. “1.4 shipped in March and we are still waiting on the second wave of consumer-side rollouts. 1.5 is well-scoped and well-paced, but the question for buyers in 2026 is what’s compatible today, not what’s in the working draft.”
What it means if you are buying now
A vacuum or set of shades bought this year will not gain Matter 1.5 support until its maker ships new firmware, and the Alliance’s own timeline puts that in 2027. Buy for what a device supports today, and treat a manufacturer’s 1.5 promise as a bonus rather than a reason. Our analysis of the state of smart-home interoperability under Matter 1.4 explains where support stands now, and our guide to setting up a secure smart home covers the network side.
Ronan Whitfield-Asari wrote this report. Consumer Tech Wire’s smart-home coverage is collected on the Smart Home desk.