First Matter Fridge, More CES Releases, & Apple's 2025 Smart Home Roadmap
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Welcome everybody to another exciting episode of HomeKit Insider. You've got me, your host as always, Andrew O'Hara, with more smart home news of the week. And crazy enough, despite how much CES coverage we had last week, there are still more things that I have discovered. Stuff that I didn't see while on the floor, press releases that I didn't get.

and still stuff to talk about. So we have some Apple news, we have CES news, we have a couple plugs for some really great content that dropped in the last week or so, and then we're going to go over again Apple's 2025 lineup for the smart home and what we should be excited for. So let's kick things off. Quinn Nelson, who runs the YouTube channel Snazzy Labs, does

Smart Homes Still Suck

Every week, like some of these frustration and pain points, and he breaks it down in a very easy way that's shareable and can really kind of explain the smart home and the problems that we're in from start to finish from what is matter to

Matter versus thread because they're not the same. Matter adoption issues and so on. So it's really, really interesting. It points out a couple of the biggest things. For example, how Apple is just starting to support Matter 1.2 and things like that and robotic vacuum cleaners and how you can have a device that says it's Matter-enabled. But platforms that support Matter don't necessarily have the least –

version of Matter. You know, Google's still sitting on Matter 1.0, Amazon's on 1.3, Apple's trying to get into the 1.2 situation, but then even things like the robotic vacuum cleaners, that's like the only thing Apple's adding, and they're leaving out the rest of the update, so it's confusing, and I know you guys all know that, but

It's a really great video. I really like a lot of these custom animations that Quinn has done that kind of just break down like the different smart home layers from like the ecosystems to matter to the protocols, all that stuff. Really nice work. So if you're interested, check it out. I've linked it in the show notes.

Well, let's go ahead and jump back into CES news. We're hitting it again from a week ago because there's a few things to chat about. There was a Matter fridge at CES, and I didn't get to see it. And I'm kicking myself left and right because I thought there's no reason I need to visit the Bosch booth today.

It wasn't on my list of things to go meander over. But of course, Jennifer Toohey from The Verge, she went over there and got a look at it for herself. So it's this new Bosch 100 Series French door bottom mount refrigerator, I think is the

full term for this model that's going to be launching in the U.S. in the middle of this year. And this will be the first Matter-enabled fridge here in the U.S. As far as what you can do with Matter, I believe you can monitor the temperature and then adjust the temperature from, you know, what would be the home app if Apple actually supported fridges in the home app.

See Quinn's video for why that's currently a problem. But it's at least progress because the more and more of these devices that start to get out there, the more pressure Apple has to actually start adopting them in the home app, let alone, you know, Amazon and Google and the smart things and everything like that. Then again, smart things have been ahead of the curve on this whole thing. So we can't really criticize them too much at the moment.

But this is a very nice looking fridge. It's pretty simple compared to a lot of the smart fridges out there. There's no massive screen on it like Samsung or anything. Just looks like a very classy fridge.

I dig the look of this thing. I'm glad there's MatterSupport here. This looks like a reliable fridge to consider if you want one that's going to have Matter. It's not just over the top. They'll say they're really pushing MatterSupport. They're going to have a couple different appliance categories for like the next couple years as they add more and more and more devices with Matter to their lineups. So this is really awesome. I'm very excited about it. So our first fridges with Matter landing later this year.

So Flick, we talked about them prior to the show. The Flick duo was being teased. Some revolutionary new smart button. Well, I got to try it at CES, actually. This is one I actually got to try and I didn't talk about on the last episode.

So the Flick Duo is just what it sounds like. It is a small little button. It was only about an inch and a half, maybe two inches long. And there was a larger button on there and a smaller button. Basically, each of those buttons had a press, a double press, and a hold, I want to say. So like three commands for each of those two buttons. And then you had other gestures. So there's actually like accelerometers and stuff in there. So you could press a button and then like flick.

Flick Your Wrist to the Right or Left.

They had a little table set up with multiple lamps and they would point the button at it and then like flick to the right and it would cycle through colors. So you just keep flicking your wrist to go through a bunch of different colors that were set up really easy and smooth.

Then you could also press and hold the button and then rotate your wrist and the button and twist clockwise or counterclockwise. And in doing so, you could adjust the brightness. So making it go brighter or dimmer, depending on if you were turning clockwise or counterclockwise. I like that too.

Finally, you could also differentiate between handheld and being wall-mounted. So you could actually have different commands when it is, like, magnetically attached to your wall versus holding it in your hand and moving about your house. In total, there seems like a lot of commands that can be programmed for this button. Frankly, too many, possibly?

I don't know. This seems a product that is definitely geared towards the tinkerer, the smart home enthusiast.

I can't see, you know, my parents having a button like this with this many commands and pressing and twisting and flicking all of these types of... It's too many things. And I don't see that just being for the masses. And that's okay. I want more cool, techie things that make sense for, like, the real smart home crowd. So...

There's nothing wrong with that at all. But even just watching it, I was a little overwhelmed. And I thought it was funny because they include like a sticker sheet where you can put...

like what you're controlling with it on there. But when you have this many controls, how do you even know? I need 30 stickers for all the different commands to know what they are. So I like the idea of it, but I still struggle with it a little bit, just trying to remember everything that it can do. So maybe you just do one or two things, but you don't have to use them all. But it is something that just kind of feels overwhelming when you start to get into it.

Then Yale has released an update for its Linus L2 smart lock. This actually came out earlier in 2024, and it's for Mortise-style locks. Well, now it's come out with a new update that adds support for Matter. When this actually first came out, there was not even support for Apple Home. So this is a huge update because not only are we getting Matter here, which is fantastic,

you know, cool. We like to see Matter updates, but now it'll bring support for Apple Home thanks to Matter. So a couple different benefits just by that update. This is huge. We're always talking about how European locks are kind of missing out on this. There's not as many of them. Now it's a Matter Apple Home-enabled lock. The, whatever, what, Yale. Yale Linus L2 Smart Lock for Mortise Doors.

Wrapping up, our CES coverage is the Schlage Sense Pro. So this is another ultra-wideband enabled lock. So now there are, I guess, two. And they are also not clear on how this is actually being implemented. This is coming out in the middle of 2025. I'm guessing it's going to be on the high end as far as smart locks go, but it does use ultra-wideband to exactly determine where you are, where your phone is, and unlock your door as you approach.

I don't think it's going to be using like Matter and Alero because as we talked about with the Ultra Lock one, those aren't finalized yet. The Alero spec from the CSA is not finalized. Therefore, the chipset is not finalized. Therefore, you cannot release a product now and have that in there.

There is a possibility that that could be updated down the line, but you can't guarantee that right now because not everything is locked in. So I still think that part's interesting. There shouldn't be any issues with it, though, just like we talked about with the Ultra Lock. It's a little confusing, but it should work the same. We should be able to get the same functionality here, so I don't see why...

Why, like, to necessarily hold off? Once you set it up through the Schlage app, you should be good to go, and it'll be able to do, like, centimeter-level accuracy of where your phone is as you approach, establish that connection, authenticate, unlock before you get to your door. I love this. I think it's necessary. We're going to see more and more ultra-wideband locks. We're getting our first ones. Now, why?

from UltraLock, from Utech, and Schlage, they're just not adopting that open standard that allows them to show in, like, the home app and do that. So we'll see, but it's definitely interesting that we're getting a second one coming to market in the middle to earlier this year.

Okay, I want to talk about a few more things before we get to them. Let's go ahead and take a break. Thank our sponsor for the episode. It is Shopify. Personally, I am done shopping for a little while. I feel like I did so much of it between the holidays and then even like preparing for CES a little bit. I was still shopping online and grabbing things. But every time I do, I love when I see that Shopify enabled site. It makes it so easy on everybody.

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I know that my money is safe. If something should ever go wrong, I am protected because I'm going through a Shopify website. That payment process is going through Shopify and I'm not handing my credit card information to some shady company that I don't know. I know everything's protected.

From a consumer point of view, you have that really easy checkout process. Then everything can be tracked in the shop app. It just kicks it right over there into the shop app. I can pull up my orders. I can see where my stuff is. It's being fulfilled. It has been shipped. I can see tracking numbers. And even that, guys, it'll implement or it'll integrate into the Apple store.

So you can see almost all of these sites that support Shopify will show in Apple Wallet. So it's amazing to see, like, how many orders have you seen show up there? Probably not that many, but if you have, I almost can guarantee they're coming from a Shopify website.

because there's that level of integration. I mean, it's so many benefits for Apple users from the privacy aspect to Apple Pay to tracking an Apple wallet. I love it from beginning to end. It's just so easy to implement. They have all these things here that I can talk about that if you didn't know, they have social media tools, they have inventory management systems that'll integrate between like your online store and physical retail. So you can like

sync them across each other and you can do online orders for in-store pickup and ship from the store. All of that stuff. They have this AI tool that'll help convert people who are adding things to their cart and, and help convert those sales. Oh, that's amazing. I don't even need to tell you guys all that. You probably know it. So here's what you guys can do. Establish a,

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opinions. And I think it just needs, I think it needs more awareness. So we're going to talk about CarPlay and GM in particular. So GM has made waves in the Apple community by spurring CarPlay saying, not only are we not supporting CarPlay next generation 2.0, we're ditching current CarPlay.

They've announced that like all their new vehicles, their new EVs, all that stuff is going away from car play for their own in-house designed system. Now, anyone who's had an in-house designed car system probably knows how typically atrocious they are. And GM touts all these, oh, when we have control over the entire system, we can make it a better experience. And GM,

That is just not ever the case. It really isn't. It's always a subpar experience. From any time that I have...

use these cars. Like they cannot design infotainment systems to save their lives, which is why we have the Android auto and Google or Android auto and Apple car play that have come out to try to fix some of the issues that these car manufacturers have put themselves in. And despite car play or Android auto being one of the number one requested features for new vehicles, uh,

GM is pushing it away. So why? Why are they doing that? And they can say things like, oh, it's because we want this better experience for our customers. But we know that is a load of crap. And part of the reason why is, of course, data. We have seen the amount of data that car companies are starting to be able to collect. And this all comes a bit too ahead when this week a new...

kind of came out that says GM is being barred from selling customer-deriving data for five years. This comes out after a New York Times expose that revealed GM was straight up selling customer data to third-party data brokers as well as insurance companies. It was selling private data without any of its customers' consent or knowledge. And

And we're talking about really micro actions that it was collecting. So they were able to tell how fast you were accelerating, how frequently and hard you were breaking. And they were taking all of this information and then selling it to data brokers and insurance companies. Why would an insurance company need to know that? Well, because they wanted to raise your rates. So they were actually seeing customers' insurance rates go up.

Because GM was secretly ratting on them to their insurance companies and through the data brokers.

And that's not even the scariest. Imagine what other data that GM would be able to collect. I mean, if they have that access, that full entertainment system in your car, and you can't go through something like CarPlay, they can see where you're driving to. They can know when you're home, when you're at work. They know what restaurants you're going to, what stores you shop at, where you like to eat, all of these things. They would be able to tell. And they would be able to sell that data.

Of course, obviously it should be opt in and people should be aware of that, but they'll be able to sell that data. So it's, it's just scary. So the whole thing about wanting the best for their customers is so absolute nonsense. They want to charge for software features in the car. They want to be able to charge for, you know, possibly things like the maps and other maybe AI features that they want to offer in the future. And then they want to be able to monetize your data in a bunch of different ways.

We'll see how all this actually plays out. But to me, it's scary and it's terrible. And I for sure am not going to purchase another GM vehicle ever because of stuff like this, let alone the fact that they were selling that data. And the fact that they're just, again, so I'm repeating myself, but they're pushing away CarPlay to go for their own stuff. And they've already gotten caught selling your data without your permission.

And I'm not expecting them to all of a sudden change and become altruistic here in the future. It's clear what they want. They're not going to be able to do that.

They want you, they want to sell you and everything they can get about you. And I think it's awful. So I hope no one else buys a GM vehicle. There's a lot of other great options out there that maybe don't want to do such shady stuff. There's still other shady car dealers for sure. And we can put the alleged spin on all this stuff, but I don't know. It doesn't make me happy or feel safe to buy a GM vehicle in any way.

Well, let's round out this episode talking about Apple's 2025 lineup and possibly into 2026. We've talked about a lot of these things throughout the year last year, and now that we're actually in the new year, when are we going to start to see some of this stuff materialize? Apple's smart home plans, 2025, the year of the smart home. I'm going to keep calling it that. But things are going to start off here early in the year, possibly as early as March or February. I'm actually leaning a little bit towards February.

February at this point with the release of iOS 18.3. So we already got the third developer beta of iOS 18.3 last week. This update will be including support for robotic vacuum cleaners, a big new addition that we have been waiting for. We also got a few other changes in this update, including Apple removing the Apple news summaries that are created by Apple intelligence and

Three's wise. We had some very unfortunate headlines come from Apple intelligence summaries and people wanted them better. So now Apple added like a warning inside of setting saying, Hey, FYI, these are in beta. They may be inaccurate, all that kind of stuff.

They also had to just, they reined them in. So they disabled them for certain apps. They will be bringing them back in the future. So this is all temporary, but it looks like at least by release, like the release of 18.3, Apple new summaries with AI will be disabled. Big feature though, for smart home users is robotic vacuum cleaners to reiterate how these are going to work.

Robotic vacuum cleaners in the home app. We support it. So you can use Apple's assistant to send out your robots, but there will not be any room pairing. So I will not be able to say, you know, Apple assistant go clean Harrison's room. I cannot say go clean Harrison's room, the dining room and the kitchen. Nothing like that. I can just say, go clean. I can also say like, come back to the dock. Um,

all of those things. So you can kind of just send out for general cleaning and coming back at status updates, those types of things. But there is no mapping or data connection from like the rooms you create in the robotic vacuum cleaner apps and matter slash the home app.

These are things that they're looking for in the future. And I do believe they'll come because we do have rooms already, you know, in Apple home. And we do have literally a LIDAR 3d mapped space of our homes in the robotic vacuum cleaners app. We just need to tie those physical 3d mappings to the virtual rooms in the home app. So I think that we're going to get there, but it's not there yet.

with where we are going to be at launch. But it's still gonna be great to be able to just send out the vacuum, bring it back, all of those, especially if you're okay doing those whole home cleans each time and you don't need just to send it out for one room or another.

Inside of the Home app, there will be a few different things that you can see. So you can change the mode. So like mopping, vacuuming, both. Like you can choose any of those you'd like to do. You can also see things like battery life. So you know how long the battery left is on there. I assume you'll be able to ask Apple's assistant that too. So how long is left on the battery and get that kind of information. But otherwise...

a ton that you'll be able to do here. A few other functions will show in the home app. It's going to depend on the robotic vacuum cleaner themselves at how much they expose into the home app and what will fall under the matter spec. So this is still great. It's still exciting. It's still progress. It's something we've been waiting for for a long time. I'm guessing at launch, we're going to see at least three to four robotic vacuum cleaners all get updated almost simultaneously. We're going to see several from Roborock. We're going to get a couple from Ecovacs. I think Dreadnoughts

Dreamy, maybe? And then SwitchBot, I would say, are probably the big ones. Eufy is in the mix. There's a number that have gotten those certificates that just have not pushed the updates out yet. Again, I talked to people out at CES, and the biggest sentiment was like, hey,

These backers already work with like Amazon's voice assistant. They already work with like Google assistant. Apple home is kind of the one they don't work with like Apple's voice assistant. So why bother pushing the matter update when it already supports the other platforms? We're really waiting for Apple home here. We really want the matter update specifically for Apple home. So they're just kind of waiting for Apple to launch before they launched their updates. So,

It makes sense to me when kind of explained like that, whether Apple is asking to hold or not, as I surmise they may be trying to do. Maybe that's still the case. I don't know.

But I think everything's going to time out to launch basically at the same time. Since we're on beta three and we're in the middle of January, I see no reason this is going to make it till March. I think we're going to get a pretty early to mid February launch on 18.3. It's a minor update. Otherwise, bug fixes, the usual stuff like that. So yeah, I'm going to say February for 18.3 with robotic vacuum cleaners first,

big smart home update of the year from Apple. After that, we could see a little bit of time. So there is this kind of rumor that Apple's working on a smart display that originally was proposed for a March timeline. Apple knew we can do like a March event, have some stuff going on there.

Possibly iPads, other things, but the smartphone displays, what I was excited for. Now, we're hearing multiple people saying it's been pushed back a little bit, but how Apple's going to handle this is not clear. Apple could still do like an event early, but then release the product later. Kind of like how they've done with home or with the Vision Pro, with Apple Watch, they've

they could do something like that. So it could get announced. We could get this nice demo of it. And then a release in a few months, maybe around WWDC and development kit and stuff at the same time.

I don't know, but Apple could announce at a different time, not lined up with manufacturing because a release or announcement and announcement doesn't have to coincide with a release. It doesn't have to be coming out at the same time. Um, so that is all very murky, but I'm going to still say March or April is when we may see this thing. That's what I think is likely to happen. And, um,

We're going to get software support to go along with it, but it's going to be a big thing. I think that could maybe time up with 18.4 because that's also going to be coming around the spring. That could be like an April release. So maybe April makes sense. That's a possibility here. But I think that's going to be the next thing on the list is that smart home display. And I think it's going to come before the end of the year, at least for us to see it at least being announced in some way.

After the smart display, we have two more products that Apple set to release in 2025. So the first one is going to be a HomePod Mini and then the Apple TV. Both of these similar on track for the end of the year.

It could be like a September thing to go along with, you know, Apple's fall releases, like the iPhone and everything like that, because they're going to be relatively minor updates. I think the biggest thing that we're going to see in probably both of them, there's going to be updated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips at how Apple is creating itself. And then we're going to have probably Apple intelligence support in some way.

And that's where I think it might be sooner than like the late fall, because I think Apple is going to want to do a little bit more with the apps and the, and the developer side of things. So I don't know if there's going to be like a WWDC thing with a release in the fall again. I don't know. Apple may just keep everything under its hat. Maybe we'll not hear almost anything about tvOS at WWDC as we often don't get a ton about it. And then Apple have more to talk about in the fall.

We'll see. I don't know, but Apple TV and HomePod mini two are also slated for this year, 2026. We will see more new products coming from Apple. Um, we're waiting on a full size HomePod. So HomePod technically third generation, it'll have a new display built into like a full color touch display. There's been rumors of these ramping up quite a bit. I actually kind of half expected this still to come out in 2025, but yeah,

A lot of like these other analysts have been saying it's a 2026 product. So maybe not this year. We're also going to get a smart home camera from Apple, uh,

That's another thing that I kind of learned about at CES. And it seems like we aren't expecting cameras as the spring update anymore. There was hope that it could make it into matter 1.5 for early this year. And it seems like it's going to be more of a long-term project. So I, it's not going to be in one five, but,

maybe we'll get one six, maybe it's next year with one seven, but don't expect matter cameras to be coming for a little while. And that really pains me to say, because that's one of the things I've been looking forward to most something, being able to see all, you know, matter cameras, like the Akara wall controller. You can see your car cameras on there, but I want to see all of my home kit cameras. And if we had matter cameras, they could all show up on this Akara matter controller.

But it's not going to be the case, at least not for a couple of years. So we may not get an actual matter camera system release until like 2027, maybe, which is painful because that's so far away. But I don't think it's going to be a matter 1.5, maybe 1.6 if we're lucky.

So, yeah, going back, we're going to have an Apple smart home camera release probably in 2026. It might be Apple only. Instead of being a matter-enabled camera, it could just be a home kit camera that Apple is creating itself, leveraging additional AI features built on Apple intelligence, programming,

Probably going to be a whole lot better than it is right now in identifying objects, people, packages, stuff like that. And you're going to see that built into like the new versions of the Apple TV that are me doing the heavy lifting on that AI processing, why it partially makes sense to upgrade those processes in there. People like, Oh, you don't really need that much for you streaming TV.

But when it's doing some of these AI heavy lifting for the smart home, it can benefit from having a higher CPU in there. So that I think we're going to get in 2026 full size home pod in 2026. There was also those rumors of Apple working on a video doorbell. I still am not sold on this one. I think it may depend on how the actual camera does. If that releases first or Apple could just be working on software features, it's going to partner with another company could partner with

Elk and Nemo, though we haven't heard from Nemo in a long time since they kind of abandoned Matter saying, we're evaluating, and then never mentioned it again. It could be Logitech because Apple has done a lot with Logitech with like the Circle View, Circle View Video Doorbell. It could be even something like Level. Apple also partnered with them. Home Key Integration, Matter, everything is great there. So maybe they will create their first video doorbell, partner with Apple, and can have it automatically unlock Logitech.

With this like face ID type solution. And again, using like AI and Apple's backend stuff. So maybe it'll partner with a third party company to develop it first and launch inside of that company. And then it could also make it available to anyone else who wants to use it. So we could see like a car doorbells using it, blah, blah, blah, but it'll have like maybe a launch product that they will be kind of like an official partner. And then more from there.

We'll see, but I think it is definitely something that will still be coming.

So, man, it's still been a little bit of a quiet week, but also I definitely felt trashed again. I really got hit Tuesday night, I want to say. I had a massive fever, over 100. I could not sleep at all. I had the sweats, like, could not sleep. Rolling around, I was hot, I was cold. Woke up the next day just completely exhausted from no sleep. And then just kind of still hitting me from CES of, like, the exhaustion of working all week. And then it was just really...

You got sick, but fortunately it was a super quick sick, literally only took like 24 hours and I was back a hundred percent again, ready to go. So covering things, Apple, Apple vision pro Apple watch compare all those things have been going up on the regular YouTube channel. Um,

Dealing with TikTok ban situations, whether that's up, down, in between, you know, changing constantly for a short-term video. So it's been a different week just trying to catch up on all the CES news and work, being sick. Son had an ear infection, so Harrison was at the doctor's office dealing with him and everything.

So it's been crazy, but I'm happy to be here chatting with you guys on the smart home stuff. I really am excited for some of the stuff from CES to actually start launching, being able to test things like the flick buttons and some robotic vacuum cleaners, especially with the matter support coming. There's going to be some really fun things coming. If you guys have any questions, if you guys have any other things you want to talk about on the show, let me know. Hit me up. You can find me all the usual places. AndroidAppleInsider.com is the email. You can also find me on Twitter at Andrew underscore OSU. You can also find me on a

blue sky I'm hanging out there too you can also just write on the comments of the YouTube channel so if you want to watch the video version of this you might pretty smiling face staring back at you it's youtube.com slash home kit insider you can view it there and live any questions and I'll answer them on the next episode of the podcast otherwise stay tuned a lot more stuff coming in this podcast 510 100 star rating on your podcast player of choice and I'll talk to you guys next time