Questions on Matter and HomeKit

Hello Home team!

First of all thanks for the great talk, and I am looking forward to using matter! I have a couple of questions though that weren't clear to me from the talk, and I hope you can clear them up.

  • In HomeKit, Acessory identifiers are different on every device I use them. This makes associating settings, icons and other things with them across several devices impossible. Will an accessoryDeviceID be something an app can rely on?
  • Will devices be filtered by the OS? Right now, HomeKit TVs are not accessible to the API, leading to much confusion for users.
  • Is there a generic way to control matter clusters? In the example there is an CHIPOnOff cluster, but I would prefer something generic that uses a clusters ID and a generic value type. This way I can write a generic SwiftUI ObservableObject that represents the cluster which is a precondition for making the cluster available to SwiftUI.
  • Scenes and automation logic in HomeKit is limited. Is it possible to interact with scenes and automations on 3rd party hubs via the CHIP/Matter framework?
  • Are Matter accessories that are exposed to Home available in HomeKit with the corresponding HomeKit IDs for services and characteristics? Are the same accessories accessible at the same time via the CHIP/Matter framework with their Matter IDs?

I am sure there will be a lot more questions, but for now I want to thank you for all the hard work that went into this, and I am very much looking forward to seeing HomeKit take a more open route. I got a ton of ideas on what to build on top of this, if the APIs let me 😃

Best, Gernot.