Mesh Networks Are About To Escape Apple, Amazon and Google Silos

After more than two decades of promises and false starts in the mesh networking space, the smart home standards that Apple, Amazon and Google have each championed are finally set to escape their respective brand silos and work together in a single unified network.

Starting January 1, 2026, Thread 1.4 becomes the Thread Group's only certified standard, bringing a crucial new capability called credential sharing. Devices from different manufacturers can now securely join the same mesh network -- an Amazon Echo Show and an Apple HomePod mini in the same house will both be able to control the same Nanoleaf lightbulb. This marks a significant departure from Thread 1.3, released in 2022, where each brand's mesh network connected only to devices from that same brand.

The Thread Group launched in 2014 as a coalition led by Arm, Google's Nest Labs, and Samsung, later welcoming Apple and Amazon into the fold. Thread 1.4 handles low-power smart home devices and sensors, but homes also need high-bandwidth connections for laptops and phones. Wi-Fi 7 mesh serves that purpose and the Matter protocol acts as a translation layer between the two different mesh networks. Both Wi-Fi 7 and Matter arrived in products on store shelves in 2025.

Next year's Xmas lights..

[mattr]

will be individually addressable LEDs on a wire driven by a local LLM!

Re:

[TwistedGreen]

That would be the ultimate evolution of der blinkenlichten

Re:

[Registered Coward v2]

That would be the ultimate evolution of der blinkenlichten

Yea, and someone will gefingerpoken und mittengraben den.

Re:

[Pf0tzenpfritz]

I'm not sure a language model is the right thing to control several hundered LEDs expecting RGB color codes.

Surveillance Capitalism at its fines!

[jenningsthecat]

These companies will compete with each other to the death, yet they'll also cooperate with each other to rape citizens' privacy and move them ever further toward becoming chattel / cattle. (Are cattle automatically chattels? I'm not sure).

Anyway, it seems to me that interoperability like that described in TFA serves corporations more than it serves consumers. "Divide and Conquer" has an oft ignored corollary: "Unite and Rule".

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[davidwr]

Are cattle automatically chattels?

In some places, cattle are considered holy.

Is there anyplace left where customers/users are worshiped like gods?

Re: Surveillance Capitalism at its fines!

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

Why should a mark be considered as anything but a source of revenue?

Re:

[evil_aaronm]

Well, ya know, "The customer is always right." But, god help us, they're not. On average - distribution curve - customers are dipshits.

Re: Surveillance Capitalism at its fines!

[Fons_de_spons]

I do not get the link between thread and surveillance. It is basically just a wifi variant for iot. Sure somehow the big ones will be able to access all this data, sure you need to think twice about filling your house with little devices that can monitor a lot... but if we just used wifi instead of thread, the same would happen. It would just be a bit more expensive and power hungry?

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[jenningsthecat]

I suppose I could be wrong, but my thinking is that this cooperation does several potentially dangerous things.

First and foremost, it makes the whole smart home idea a lot more attractive to a lot more people. I'm not against smart homes but I am very much against surveillance capitalism. It seems to me that the presence of companies such as Google, Amazon, and Samsung guarantees at least data collection, and probably ads which follow people around.

Second, standards sharing and cross-platform capability all

Re: Surveillance Capitalism at its fines!

[Fons_de_spons]

Thanks for the clarification. Personally, I am experimenting a bit with smart wall plugs. Controlling them is done with a raspberry pi. It is simple stuff like: if power consumption is low for half an hour, shut off the plug. Same with a heating valve. I am annoyed with all the different platforms. Buying one is always a gamble. How controllable is it. So I welcome all efforts to standardize this. But you have a good point there. More standardization makesdata sharing easier. Sigh, would be great to be a fl

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[Tony Isaac]

Every wifi connection already knows where you are, all the time. How does this change anything?

Best part? telemetry from inside your home.

[laxr5rs]

let the Big Tech companies watch!

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[Tony Isaac]

So you think they're not already doing this?

...and it's deprecated. Fuck you, buy another.

[paul_engr]

NT

LOL WUT

[Anonymous Coward]

They are years late, there's a bunch of working, cheap and available open hardware/software rf mesh solutions that just work and interoperate fine. Keep your NSA-infused shit for home use, trumptards.

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[arglebargle_xiv]

Yup. Both Thread and Matter are great examples of late-to-the-party (more like last-to-the-party) protocols of elephantine bulk and byzantine complexity created via design-by-committee (actually design-by-vendor-special-interest) processes intended to solve all problems for all parties and incorporate every wish of every special-interest participant, all meant to be implemented on an STM32 or similar. How could it not follow illustrious predecessors like OSI, DCE, CORBA, and many others into taking the wo

Tor

[dohzer]

Y'all got any of those onion mesh networks hiding in the silos?

I’ll believe it when others report it

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Last year, I bought a pack of Meross smart light bulbs, because NY Times Wirecutter said they were the choice to work with Apple’s HomeKit. The one bulb I installed worked great with Siri, but only for a little while. Once HomeKit could no longer see the device, you had to delete it and re-add it, which meant climbing up to the ceiling fan and removing the globe to get to the bulb to scan the QR code printed on the bulb. After it dropped the third time, I gave up and just use the Meross app to control it. Dimmimn, color, and color temperature are all controllable.

Home Automation has been promised for at least 11 years now (Apple introduced HomeKit in September 2014; not sure when Amazon opened their APIs to third party vendors). And for a lot of people, it doesn’t work better than old-fashioned power switches. Yes, home automation offers new features, you can control them from a distance, or with your voice. But they also have costs, in configuring, and repairing configurations, and obsolescence, that the preceding technology just didn’t have.

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[AmiMoJo]

Always look for stuff that can run Tasmota, or another open source firmware. There are lightbulbs that do.

Then you get full control, reliability, and no end of support date.

Home Assistant already does this

[bart_smit]

Rather than trust a perhaps fragile truce between cloud companies who are otherwise fighting for your data, keep everything in-house with an open source privacy-first solution that does so much more than avoid having to log into different 'ecosystems' just to use the stuff you buy. https://www.home-assistant.io/ [home-assistant.io]

+1 for Home Assistant

[Tschaine]

They do a pretty good job of cross-silo integration. I have products from a half-dozen unrelated companies working together under the Home Assistant umbrella.

At this point I'd be just as happy if 3rd party hardware all just used wifi or USB-serial, plus enough documentation for Home Assistant to integrate them.

The Thread stuff is intriguing, though. It'll be interesting to see if the new standard gets traction or just fades away like so many before it.

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[war4peace]

They do a pretty good job of cross-silo integration. I have products from a half-dozen unrelated companies working together under the Home Assistant umbrella.

Exactly. Home Assistant makes it easy to unify several brands under the same hood.

I Found an Easier Solution...

[Skjellifetti2]

Reaches over and turns off light using a finger to flip the switch.

There are an awful lot of consumer tech gadgets out there where the benefit-cost ratio (including purchase, installation, and the aggravation of ongoing maintenance) is less than zero.

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[umopapisdn69]

Exactly this! +10 to Home Assistant. It’s open-source, local-first, and privacy-centric, with broad support for smart-home standards via a non-vendor hub.

TL;DR
1. Use Home Assistant; avoid vendor apps and clouds.
2. Firewall all Wi-Fi/Thread devices to block outbound traffic (effective, though not theoretically perfect).
3. I prefer Zigbee: non-IP, non-routable, local-only mesh.
4. Choose vendors that sell hardware, not telemetry (e.g., Shelly, Ikea, Athom, etc).

Matter (over Wi-Fi or Thread) is gaini

Re:

[umopapisdn69]

Also see recent Slashdot: How Home Assistant Leads a 'Local-First Rebellion' [slashdot.org]

So hack Thread 1.4, gain access to all...hmmm

[bsdetector101]

So in theory, once you hack Thread 1.4, gain access to all your smart devices you have. No thanks, just another reason why I don't have smart devices in my house.

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[bagofbeans]

It will also mean that products that you don't want to allow internet access for will mesh connect to whatever they can and pooch around the mesh networks to find WAN access, perhaps 5 doors down the road.

There's no escape

[serafean]

Instead of one company, we'll be subject to the whims of the matter/thread grift scheme.

https://docs.keyfactor.com/ejb... [keyfactor.com]
> In the Matter IoT specification, certificates are used to implement unique identities to ensure that only authenticated and certified devices are allowed to join the network.

So your home network might refuse to accept uncertified devices. Smartphones and routers refusing to work with uncertified devices will be the norm in a few years.