I’m new to the Matter smart home protocol. I have done some reading and get the basic idea but coming from a hardware/firmware background (not app development), I would love to get some insight into the app development/integration process for smart home devices. Let’s say I am developing my own smart lock system with:
- Hardware support for Thread/WiFi and BLE (nRF chips for example), and
- Firmware SDK that supports Matter over Thread/WiFi with BLE for initial pairing.
Let’s say I have coded the firmware with my devices’s unique smart lock requirements. And now I want to integrate it with a popular smart home platform (app) on the market (the likes of WiZ, Google Nest, Alexa, Apple Home and Home Assistant). Of course, I will have to make sure that these platforms actually support Matter devices first and foremost (which they do). The next step is one that I’m very confused about: how do I get my device-specific features integrated in these existing apps? The pairing and adding of my device will be handled by the existing app’s infrastructure itself, as I understand, but what about features unique to my device? Just an example: using a pin code to verify authenticity of the user for opening the lock. Take Google Nest as an example. They provide an SDK/API that I can use. Say I start coding using this. Do I then need to “submit” this code to Google Nest for integration into their app so that when a customer installs my lock, opens up Google Home on their phone and adds my device, they see the button for firing a pin code (above example)?