The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) announced Matter 1.6 in June 2026 at Unify, its inaugural conference in Austin, Texas. The updated smart home interoperability standard introduces Joint Fabric, a feature that allows multiple ecosystems — Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung SmartThings — to co-manage a single shared Matter network.
Under the current system, each platform creates and manages its own separate network, and sharing devices across them is a cumbersome process. Joint Fabric changes that by creating one unified network that all authorized platforms can access simultaneously. Users would add a device once and have it appear across every authorized ecosystem automatically, with the ability to revoke any platform’s access at any time without losing their devices.
Matter 1.6 also adds two other updates. Full NFC setup support eliminates the need to scan a QR code, allowing users to tap to pair a device — and to pair it before powering it on, which could be useful when installing smart bulbs or wired switches. A new Thermostat Suggestions feature provides a standardized way for thermostats to receive and prioritize time-based recommendations across ecosystems, so that a manual temperature change on one platform can prevent an automated request from another from overriding it shortly after.
Joint Fabric builds on a previous attempt called Fabric Sync, introduced in Matter 1.4 in 2024, which allowed devices set up in one ecosystem to be shared to another through a single authorization step — but still kept each platform on its own separate network. The CSA said at the time that major platforms were expected to implement Fabric Sync within a year; as of mid-2026, that adoption has not materialized.
Slow platform adoption has been a recurring obstacle for Matter since its 2022 launch. Joint Fabric could shift control of device management from platforms to users, but whether the major ecosystems will implement it quickly remains an open question.
Source: The Verge