Wyze Integration?

[tc10]

Does Wyze have a defined integration strategy?

I see many “Maybe-Later”…

What is on the books now?

Is there any “integrations” That are “In-Progress” or “In Beta”?

Thanks.

[carverofchoice]

It is a complicated period for integration and hard to give any certainty, but I have been asking about this in AMA’s and watching all the comments in the Wishlists, and asking employees and many other such things. From my understanding, it basically sits like this:

Wyze joined the Connectivity Standards Alliance, that governs the Matter Standard, in the Spring of 2021. Most comments from Wyze have been saying that they are watching Matter closely and considering what to do about it.

Some of the most official statements indicating support for this include from the AMA of VP of Product:

I’ve also been the loudest voice of support our Matter expert, Frederik, who has made a compelling case for the shift away from cloud-only control paradigms.

Matter is super strategic for us. Our first product in the Matter ecosystem will be out in just a few months, but I can’t reveal specifics yet .

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. Cameras are obviously our core strength, but we do feel that the other smart home products like locks, plugs and bulbs will benefit from supporting Matter in the future. It’s such an emerging space that it’s hard to comment on specifics, but we did join the CSA a year ago and will continue to invest in [Matter].

[Current devices supporting Matter is] 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.

Our shift in [the API/inter-connectivity] area will be toward Matter and figuring out the best local-control experience that integrates all the diverse parts of our ecosystem. A lot of the use cases that you would normally send over to IFTTT or Home Assistant, etc., will be covered by the new local ecosystem.

Along with some Quotes this year from other employees:

@WyzeJasonJ

@holocron

What’s the timeline on Matter support? What will it cover?

I don’t have the details on that yet.

@holocron

Matter is a long way off (no really, it is despite being "released) and none of the current products will support it.

I do know some of our products are able to support Matter, cameras are obviously a long way off due to the standards not even being in place yet.

@holocron

HomeKit is here today.

Yep so is SmartThings and the many other integrations users have asked for so we put our resources into the one that would get us into the most areas rather than trying to do them all one at a time.

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In many places, Wyze has stated that it is their hope that Matter will allow integration of other platforms. Then they would only have to support Matter, and it will automatically make support possible to Apple, SmartThings, Alexa, Google, Home Assistant, Hubitat or whatever else anyone is interested in. This makes for a much smarter business move than expending TONS of resources to start and do upkeep for every single platform individually. That would be a nightmare and there will always be niche groups upset that their niche platform isn’t natively supported even though the majority of Wyze users don’t use it.

Unfortunately, Matter progress is really slow. While there is support for a few things right now, it’s still not very advanced or stable, and some companies have even begun to cancel their Matter support for the time being because it is not yet as amazing as everyone had hopes of, but it is making good progress.

The hope is that Matter will allow integration with whatever your favorite platform is. Wyze has said recently this year that they are still watching Matter closely. They’re just not quite ready to fully jump into it the way it currently sits with so many limitations and not so many benefits to warrant full-out resources toward it.

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Having said all of that, Wyze has allowed some 3rd party integrations to do their own development. Some of the most popular include:

• Wyze Home Bridge for HomeKit integration
• Docker Wyze Bridge for converting the Camera streams to WebRTC/RTSP/RTMP/HLS for local use
• Joshua’s Home Assistant HACS plugin
• WyzeHub (Hubitat Integration)
• Tiny Cam

And of course official integrations:

• Google Home,
• Google Fit
• Alexa
• IFTTT

Wyze actually recently released an official API Key specifically to allow the 3rd party integrations to continue to operate.

They have also said that they haven’t ruled out direct integrations with Home Assistant and some others in the future (not this year though).

But the overall summary is that nothing is being worked on for this year, 2023 the Year of the Camera. More integration considerations may happen next year…but a lot of it is kind of pending on how well Matter progresses and if it lives up to the hype. It’s still really early days right now though.

[holocron]

@carverofchoice

But the overall summary is

a lot of HOPEIUM.

[holocron]

@carverofchoice

WyzeHub (Hubitat Integration)

This has largely been abandoned, since the dev has been MIA for months. This is no longer valid.

[tc10]

@carverofchoice thank you for this very helpful timely update.

What becomes obvious in reading through this, is that with 10s if not 100s of millions of existing Wyze devices, and Matter, focussed on new devices, only,
there is an intense need to provide further integration updates to interfaces, including Alexa.
Hopefully the Wyze executive will provide at least one or two programmers
to focus on updates/enhancement to these critical integrations, as they do so much without necessarily a lotta of additional programming.

[carverofchoice]

@tc10

focussed on new devices, only,

It is worth clarifying that it’s possible some past devices will gain compatibility in one way or another. Even if they don’t all gain access directly, there has been a recent effort with matter to provide compatibility with legacy devices through leveraging a “bridge” that would link other things on a company’s platform to be accessible with Matter even if the legacy device itself can’t support the libraries natively. So don’t necessarily count out existing devices completely. And some of Wyze’s existing devices do actually have the necessary resources to support Matter natively, though some definitely do not and would absolutely need a matter bridge.