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Wyze sells some of the most popular smart home devices around, most notably the Wyze Cam series. The company hosted an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) on Reddit earlier today, revealing a few details about the company’s upcoming plans.
No Matter For Existing Products
There has been excitement around the upcoming ‘Matter’ smart home ecosystem, which aims to unify and simplify setup and management tools for smart home products. The end goal is for any Matter-certified device to work with any other Matter-compatible hubs and devices, removing the headaches around compatibility that exist today.
However, Wyze isn’t expecting to bring Matter support to its existing products. When asked about updating Wyze devices to work with Matter, Wyze Product VP Steve McIrvin said in a Reddit comment today, “that’s unlikely due to the requirements of running both the Wyze firmware stack and a Matter-compatible firmware image. We’ve been down several paths on this strategy and the most likely scenario is that we’ll need to introduce new products with higher resource limits (especially flash memory and RAM) to support Matter.”
The company is also still investigating how to bring its cameras into the Matter ecosystem. McIrvin said, “the biggest obstacle for us, as you might have guessed, is that there’s really no definition yet for cameras in the Matter guidelines. It’s not one of the two dozen or so categories that they have defined yet. There is a working group that is just now being formed, so we intend to participate in that.”
Upcoming Products
Wyze has released new products at a rapid rate over the past few years, so it’s not too surprising that the company has more in the pipeline. The first one is a Matter-compatible product, which will be available “in just a few months,” but it’s not clear what type of device it will be.
Steve McIrvin also confirmed a smart light switch is in the works that won’t require a neutral wire. Smart switches are a popular way to add smart controls to light fixtures, especially in cases where smart light bulbs aren’t practical, but they usually require a neutral wire in the wall for power input — something many homes don’t have. McIrvin said on Reddit, “a large percentage of houses in the US were built before neutral wiring was required, so we’ll have a pretty innovative solution to address those houses in the next few months (certainly before the end of the year).”
Other Information
The most-upvoted question in the AMA asked about the status of Wyze’s RTSP firmware, which was beta software that allowed Wyze cameras to be monitored using the standard Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), instead of proprietary local or cloud-based solutions. Steve McIrvin said, “The reason we took it down was because we had not been able to keep it fully in synch with the changes we had rolled out to the rest of our firmware images. We don’t have plans right now to re-post that image.”
RTSP was one way to monitor Wyze camera feeds from a desktop computer or laptop (without running the Android app in a virtual machine). Wyze is working on an official web viewer for cameras, and the company confirmed in the AMA that it’s currently working on Firefox support and other improvements.
Source: Reddit
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