Shortcut Labs has been openly working towards the goal of turning its smart home hubs (Flic Hub LR and Flic Hub Mini) into Matter controllers. for a long timeand now the company tells him The edge It has done it. On Friday, Shortcut will roll out an update that the company says allows its devices to easily act as standalone hubs for Matter devices without being part of the ecosystems of companies like Apple, amazon, Google or Samsung.
It’s an appealing idea: a way to build a smart home without turning to one of the big tech companies and the concerns about privacy and attempts at lock-in that entails. Part of the promise of the Matter standard is that it gives users freedom of choice, but still, we’ve mostly had to use at least one of those big ecosystems. Flic’s Matter controller update hints at a more complete version of that promise.
Shortcut Labs co-founder Joacim Westlund Prändel wrote in an email to The edge that while Flic with Matter can (for example) control Apple Home devices after they are paired with Flic, it is not quite A two-way street. For example, you can’t add a Flic device to the Apple Home app using Matter. However, you can add Flic 2 buttons to the Apple app via the devices’ existing HomeKit integration (though only with the Flic Hub LR, as the Hub Mini isn’t HomeKit certified).
“You have to use our products to control other Matter stuff,” Prändel told me in an interview, “but at least you won’t be dependent at all on any privacy concerns or any big tech.” Shortcut Labs doesn’t sync device data to any cloud servers, CTO Oskar Öberg, who was also at the interview, wrote in a follow-up email. (You can review Flic’s privacy policy here.) here.)
No new hardware or other purchases are necessary; Matter controller functionality will be coming to Shortcut hubs as a free update starting Friday. And all Flic products will receive Matter support, Öberg said. He added that the company's controller will “literally support everything that's in the Matter standard.”
Creating a Matter controller also allows the company's Flic Twist — a smart button with a dial that's useful for things like dimming lights or controlling smart blinds — to work with other products that use the standard. That's because Matter isn't yet compatible with devices like the Twist. “In fact, our Flic Twist is the first rotary thing you can do with Matter, which I think is really cool,” Prändel said.
Öberg says one of the things his team wanted to do was make setting up a device less opaque compared to the experience on other platforms, where a device can fail to integrate and it’s hard to figure out why. But when you set up a Matter device through the Flic app, you can see what’s happening throughout the automated process, as shown in the screen recording above, making troubleshooting easier.
Shortcut Labs is relatively unknown in the tech world, and that's part of what's exciting about the launch of its Matter controller. If such a small company can pull it off, maybe others will follow suit and come up with clever concepts and ideas.
