Z-Wave is remaking itself to find a new place in your smart home

The invention of Matter was a grand kumbaya moment for the smart home. Built on the foundations of almost every concept smart home companies had dreamed up — from Apple’s HomeKit to Google’s Thread — the idea was to create a new technology on top of existing ones. One common standard to make it easier for manufacturers to build smart home devices and easier for people to use them, no matter which smart home platform they use.

But one protocol was left out of the party: Z-Wave, which is widely used in home security systems and embraced by the smart home enthusiast community. It was the latest example of Z-Wave getting left behind as the consumer smart home world explodes in popularity — and the latest reason to question whether the once-thriving standard still has a future.

Conceived in the late 1990s, Z-Wave is one of the original solutions for connecting IoT devices. It’s a local, RF-based wireless communications technology that relies on a central hub or gateway to talk to the cloud and other protocols. But that reliance on a hub is part of why it’s fallen out of fashion. You rarely see Z-Wave in mass-market smart home devices because other standards can connect …

Read the full story at The Verge.