DAVIS, May 8 — The Connectivity Standards Alliance on Thursday published the Matter 1.5 working draft for member-company review, adding robot-vacuum, motorized window-covering, and air-quality device classes to the smart-home interoperability standard, with a target ratification date in the third quarter.
The release is the first preview of Matter 1.5 since the 1.4 specification shipped in March. The 1.4 release added energy-management, camera, and doorbell device classes and a redesigned multi-admin commissioning flow. Member companies described 1.4 as the most substantively expanded device coverage in the standard’s history. Thursday’s 1.5 working draft continues that trajectory into a smaller but commercially significant set of remaining device gaps.
“Robot vacuums and motorized shades are the two categories where the ‘works with everything’ promise has been most visibly broken for the longest time,” said Tobias Andriessen-Park, a senior product manager at SmartThings and a member of the Matter steering committee, in an interview with 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.”
What is in the draft
The robot-vacuum device class in the 1.5 draft includes attribute support for cleaning-mode selection, dock-and-return commands, no-go-zone configuration, and battery-state reporting. The Alliance said the device class is designed to support both lidar-mapping and gyroscope-only navigation hardware without requiring vendor-specific extensions for either.
The motorized window-covering class supports position reporting in 1-percent increments, tilt control for venetian-style coverings, and a scheduled-operation cluster compatible with existing Matter scene infrastructure. Member companies said the class draws heavily on prior work in the Zigbee Window Covering cluster, which several manufacturers have shipped under proprietary bridges.
The air-quality device class supports particulate-matter, volatile-organic-compound, carbon-dioxide, and nitrogen-dioxide measurement, with a generalized “indoor-air-quality index” attribute that can aggregate across sensor types.
Adoption timing
The working draft is open for member-company review through July, with ratification targeted for the September CSA member meeting. Member companies said 1.5-compliant device firmware is unlikely to ship before the first quarter of 2027.
“Every Matter release has to be evaluated on the deployment lag, not the spec lag,” said Cassandra Mukherjee-Olafsson, an analyst at the smart-home research firm Telemark. “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.”
The Alliance said it will host a Matter 1.5 developer preview event alongside the previously announced Matter 1.4 developer event in Seattle in June.
Asari Whitfield-Asari covers AI tools and developer infrastructure for Consumer Tech Wire.