For most of Matter’s short life, the smart home standard had a glaring blind spot: cameras and doorbells. A $25 Matter light bulb could work across Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, and SmartThings simultaneously, while the $200 camera above the front door stayed locked to a single vendor’s app. That changed on November 20, 2025, when the Connectivity Standards Alliance finalized Matter 1.5 with full support for cameras, video doorbells, and intercoms — and 2026 is the year the first certified hardware is reaching shelves.
What Matter 1.5 added
The technical gap was real. Streaming video, two-way audio, and motion events needed a richer device model than Matter’s original specification offered. Matter 1.5 closed it with new cluster definitions, a WebRTC-based media streaming framework, and the event model required to treat cameras as first-class citizens. The spec covers live streaming, two-way audio, recording, doorbells, floodlights, and pan-tilt-zoom controls.
The practical reason cameras took so long was less technical: camera makers earned recurring revenue from their own cloud subscriptions and were not eager to make hardware easy to swap between platforms. A maintenance update, Matter 1.5.1, followed on March 31, 2026, refining the camera framework ahead of the first hardware wave.
SmartThings moved first
Samsung’s SmartThings platform stands as the first to fully support Matter 1.5 cameras, announcing the update in December 2025 and rolling it out to hubs within weeks. By early 2026, support had reached Aeotec Smart Home Hub models and the SmartThings Hub from 2018; older 2015-era hubs followed in January.
Users get live video feeds, two-way audio, motion alerts, and event logs inside a single app. Jaeyeon Jung, executive vice president and head of the SmartThings team, framed it as a standards commitment: Samsung aims to ensure that products and services built on different brands and protocols deliver a unified experience through SmartThings, and the company plans to keep backing standards like Matter while strengthening partner ties for new features.
Apple Home and Amazon Alexa followed with their own Matter 1.5 camera rollouts in the first quarter of 2026. Google Home, consistent with its slower Matter adoption pace, has trailed on the newest categories.
The hardware wave
Platform support is only half the story — cameras themselves need to ship. Aqara, Eve, and device partners began preparing Matter cameras for release starting March 2026, spanning indoor and outdoor models, video doorbells, and pan-tilt-zoom units. Live streaming, clip storage, motion zones, and privacy controls come standard under the specification.
This is a meaningful change in buyer leverage. Before Matter 1.5, choosing a camera meant choosing an ecosystem and its subscription. A Matter-certified camera can now, in principle, stream to whichever platform the household prefers — and keep working if the household switches platforms later.
What still doesn’t work the way you’d hope
The honest limitation is the one that shadows every Matter release: the specification is uniform, but platform implementation is not. SmartThings leads on version support; Apple and Alexa are active; Google Home still hasn’t fully implemented some newer Matter categories. Buying a Matter 1.5 camera and expecting full functionality in every app requires checking each platform’s current support state rather than assuming the badge covers everything.
There is also the subscription question. Matter standardizes the device-to-platform connection, not the business model. Cloud clip storage, person detection, and other advanced features may still sit behind vendor subscriptions even on Matter-certified hardware. The standard guarantees interoperability of the core device — it does not guarantee that every feature is free.
Why cameras were the tipping point
Cameras matter disproportionately because they are the category most people picture when they hear “smart home security.” Lights, plugs, locks, and thermostats all had Matter certification paths from launch, but the devices guarding the front door did not. Closing that gap removes the single biggest reason a household needed to stay inside one vendor’s walled garden.
Combined with the energy-management devices added in Matter 1.4 and the setup improvements in Matter 1.6, the standard’s coverage is now broad enough that a 2026 buyer can plausibly build an entire home — lighting, climate, security, energy — on interoperable hardware. That was the original promise from 2022. It took four years and a camera specification to get there.