Flic Matter Support - not what I was hoping for
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With the long promised Matter support now released I must say that I'm disappointed. Yes, it seems to work for anyone who wishes to stay in the Flic ecosystem, but one of the advantages of Matter is to enable interoperability between ecosystems and devices from different vendors, so the user can decide which ecosystem to use, or even use multiple ecosystems at the same time.
Flic allow me to see other Matter devices using their hub, but I can't use Flic on other ecosystems because there is no bridge that publishes Flic in Matter. That's half of the solution and it's the half I'm not using. I don't seem to be alone.
The Flic Twist was released about a year ago, it's great as a twistable switch and it works when used within the Flic eco system. It doesn't offer all of it's functionality in any other ecosystem, and it's not even fully implemented in their own SDK.
In this new dawn of IoT, major vendors, even ones that previously worked hard to lock their users into their own ecosystem, abandon exclusivity and embrace open standards like Thread and Matter. But not Flic. We're only offered full functionality within the Flic universe.
This may of course be Shortcut Labs strategy, but if so, I draw the conclusion that Flic know something that even Apple, experts in keeping users in their own ecosystem and still marching out and into Matter, have missed. I either don't understrand Shortcut Lab's strategy or – I'm not in their target group.
For Flic's sake (no pun intended) I hope there is some substance to the strategy of swimming against the stream. I'm on the brink of abandoning Flic because I cannot fully use the Twist in Home Assistant or Apple HomeKit. The only Flic product that can be well integrated in other ecosystems than Flic are my Flic 2 buttons. If it's just about buttons there are quite a few alternatives thad don't require an additional and quite expensive hub.
Please enlighten me if I have misunderstood something here.
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@Emil
People who have gone Home Assistant path want to use it for their home control, not Flic app. Other apps, such as Flic app, is something they want to get rid. Home Assistant is growing fast and there is a good reason for it - controlling your smart home has become way too spread out and complicated without something like HA.People who have Alexa already have Matter controller there, they just want to see the buttons. People who have Google ecosystem already have a matter controller. They too just want to see the buttons. Same with Homekit. Needing anoother controller and app doesn't really work as reasoning as everyone having any kind of smart home setup already have them.
I can understand the Matter controller path regarding the Twist - it's a pain that Matter doesn't support these kind of products properly yet. But being your own controller is, in the end, a patch for promises made before. I don't think Alexa, Google, Homekit nor Home Assistant users are looking forward to having another ecosystem around to complicate what they want to simplify. And I think lack of enthusiasm for flic's Matter release tells the same story.
Could be wrong, maybe sales are up like crazy. But it doesn't look like that from stupid users point of view.
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Hi Michael,
Trust me – we have had long discussions both internally as well as with the Connectivity Standards Alliance about Matter bridge vs Matter controller and in the end come to the conclusion that a controller would be the only useful and feasible option that would make a good user experience for Flic Twist.
The most important point is that there is no support for rotational devices in the Matter standard, so even if we did a bridge, the rotation feature of Flic Twist would not be supported, making it quite useless. We could support only the button on the Twist using the Switch cluster if we were a bridge, but then it would not be supported in e.g. Google Home since they don't support that cluster.
So to fully support Flic Twist with Matter, we came to the conclusion that the only feasible way forward is to make a Matter controller.
Regarding the normal Flic button, we could of course build a Matter bridge to be able to make them appear in other controllers. There are multiple reasons we have not yet done that. First, we are already integrated natively with most of the popular controllers on the market, like Homekit, Smartthings and Alexa, so the customers would not see a big value here. Second, it could confuse the users if we would be a Matter controller and Matter bridge at the same time. Third, developing this, including testing at a test house as well as certification costs would rise to the sky (Matter is already by far the way most expensive integration we have ever made). In any case, it would also have delayed the release a lot if we made both a controller and a bridge. Fourth, we believe many devices that are currently not Matter enabled but only e.g. Homekit enabled will eventually become Matter enabled, making the extra Matter controller like Homekit or Smartthings unnecessary to make the device compatible with Flic. Fifth, being only a bridge, if a user wants to control a Matter device through Flic, it would be necessary to additionally buy a third party Matter controller and have it plugged in all the time, as well as additionally download and use that corresponding app.
Even if Matter had some kind of support for rotational devices as input device, we don't see how it could nicely apply to all our features of the Flic Twist such as push-twist, selector mode, how to update the LEDs according to the status etc.
And just because we at the moment only have a Matter controller doesn't mean that we will not eventually also build a Matter bridge, but I don't see that likely until Matter adds support for rotational input devices.
There is also a feature in Matter that is very seldom talked about – the Binding feature. This is a feature where a Matter "director" can instruct a Matter client device such as a brightness remote control to start controlling a particular Matter light. This way, the client device talks to the server device directly without the need to go through any controller, after the setup is done. Unfortunately, none of the "big" controllers support this feature, and even if it did, it would only be native Matter devices that could be controlled, which we can already control anyway, since we're now a Matter controller.
With the logic in your post that Matter is made to be interoperable, note that all of the big players, Homekit, Google Home, Smartthings and so on are in that case also doing exact same thing ("locking in people") since they only implement one of the sides in Matter, namely a controller and not a bridge. If they implemented a Matter bridge, they would open up so that other apps can control devices that only support their respective protocol. When we asked a few of these players about this at CES, it seems they hadn't even thought of this idea.
For Home assistant on the other hand, you can expose your devices there to Flic using their Matter bridge feature, see https://community.flic.io/topic/18457/home-assistant-twist-another-angle. That way, Flic Twist can control them.
Regarding our "expensive hub" as you say, note that we have recently released Flic Hub mini, which is significantly cheaper than our previous hubs as well as other comparable smart home hubs, and most definitely the cheapest Matter controller on the market (feel free to correct me). We created this to make it an easier decision to start using Flic.
One last point, some/many users (including you from what I understand from your post) only want one single app to control their smart home, e.g. Snartthings or Homekit and for that reason would like to see us being a Matter bridge, so that our buttons and Twists would show up there directly instead of having to use the Flic app. Well, true, but compared to other smart devices (controllable ones), the main interaction point is not the app but the Flic itself. You usually set up the Flic once, and then you can theoretically throw away the app. In the end, our main goal and priority is to make Flic compatible with as many end devices as possible (thanks to the Matter standard, we will now be able to natively support more and more brands), so the way that it's configured is not the most important point, as long as the user can somehow set up the configurations he/she wants.
As a conclusion, it's not that we want to "lock people in" to our hub, it's just that we build what we see feasible to produce, that will satisfy most customers' needs and be a good user experience. In this case, we didn't see the usefulness and feasibility of a Matter bridge for the mentioned reasons. On the other hand, a Matter controller would open up so many opportunities not otherwise possible, so that's where we're currently focusing on.
This post became longer than intended, but I hope it delivers the big picture. Feel free to post feedback.
