For years, cameras have been the one corner of my house that refused to play along with the local-first rule I hold everything else to. Lights, sensors, locks, climate — all of it runs through Home Assistant on a mini PC in my hallway, nothing phoning home. But cameras? Cameras have been the holdout: the category where “smart” almost always meant a monthly subscription, an app you can’t avoid, and your footage sitting on someone else’s server. So when the Connectivity Standards Alliance finalized Matter 1.5 with cameras baked into the spec, I paid attention. Then I looked at what I could actually do with it today, and quietly went back to my Frigate box.
Here’s the honest version of where Matter cameras stand in mid-2026, why the idea genuinely excites me, and why I’m not changing a single line of my setup because of it — yet.
What Matter 1.5 actually added
Matter 1.5 was released by the CSA on November 20, 2025. The headline feature is cameras — three device types, to be precise: standalone security cameras (indoor and outdoor), video doorbells, and intercoms. The spec defines how the boring-but-essential stuff gets exposed to any Matter controller: live video, motion events, person and package detection, and two-way audio. There’s more in the release — unified “closures” (think garage doors, blinds, gates), soil moisture sensors, and a meaningful expansion of energy and EV-charging data — but cameras are the part that matters most to people like me.
Why? Because the whole point of the camera work is that it’s designed to run over your local network. The video is meant to be exposed to controllers on the LAN, not routed through a vendor cloud as a precondition for working at all. If you’ve spent any time being annoyed that your doorbell needs an internet connection to show you who’s at the door, you understand immediately why a local-by-design camera standard is a big deal.
Why cameras are the hill worth taking
I don’t want to be dramatic about this, but cameras are the smart-home category with the worst track record on ownership. The big cloud platforms have trained an entire generation of buyers to accept that the footage from a camera you bought, mounted on a house you own, isn’t really yours. It lives on corporate servers, it’s gated behind a subscription, and — as has been documented repeatedly — it can be handed to third parties under arrangements you never opted into. Every other part of my house I can run without an account. Cameras were the exception, and not by accident.
So a standard that says “a camera is just another local device your hub can talk to” is, in principle, the thing I’ve wanted for years. No per-vendor app. No separate API for every brand. No subscription as the price of seeing your own front step. That’s the promise. The reality, as usual, is lagging behind the press release.
What you can actually buy and use today
This is where my enthusiasm met a wall. As of mid-June 2026, exactly one major platform has shipping support for Matter cameras: SmartThings. Samsung announced in December 2025 that SmartThings was the first platform to support Matter 1.5, with cameras from partners like Aqara, Eve, and XThings rolling out from around March 2026. Apple, Google, and Amazon have all said the right things about adding Matter 1.5 controller support to their hubs, but at the time of writing they hadn’t flipped the switch.
And Home Assistant? Not yet. The team has been candid that HA doesn’t support the Matter camera device type today, because the underlying plumbing — two-way audio, for one — isn’t all there. The device type is on the roadmap, which I believe, but a roadmap is not a release. For now, if you point a Matter camera at Home Assistant, the realistic path is the same fallback we’ve always had: pull the RTSP stream directly and treat it like any other network camera.
That gap is the whole story. The standard exists. The first cameras exist. But the controller I actually run can’t speak the new language yet, so from where I sit, Matter cameras are a thing I can read about, not a thing I can deploy.
So I’m staying on Frigate
My current camera setup is boring in exactly the way I like. Cheap RTSP cameras feed Frigate, the open-source NVR, which runs locally and does its own object detection on my hardware. It doesn’t just see “motion” — it sees a person, a car, a parcel — and it does all of that without a single frame leaving the house. Recordings stay on a local disk. There’s no subscription, and the only cloud involved is the one I choose to expose, on my terms, through my own remote access.
That setup already delivers what Matter cameras are promising: local video, local detection, no vendor lock-in. The difference is that it works now, it’s well understood, and it’s been documented by a large community for years. Matter cameras might eventually make the front end of this nicer — easier pairing, less fiddling with stream URLs, true plug-and-play across brands — but they don’t yet offer a single capability my current rig lacks. Ripping out something that works to chase a standard that my hub can’t use would be the opposite of local-first discipline.
The caveat nobody puts on the box
One more thing worth saying plainly, because the marketing won’t: “Matter camera” on a label does not automatically mean “no app, no account, fully local.” Matter defines how a camera can be controlled locally, but a manufacturer is still free to bolt its own cloud features, app, and account on top. The standard opens the door; it doesn’t force anyone through it. So when these cameras land in stores in volume, I’ll be reading the fine print on each model rather than trusting the logo — the same skepticism I’d apply to anything that claims to be private.
That’s not cynicism, it’s pattern recognition. We’ve watched “works with Matter” mean very different things on different products over the last couple of years. Cameras are higher-stakes than a light bulb, and I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than burned.
Where this leaves me
I’m genuinely optimistic about Matter cameras — more than I’ve been about most of the standard’s expansions, honestly, because they target the one area where the status quo has been worst for owners. A future where a camera is just a local device my hub discovers, with no subscription and no app, is a future I want. But optimism about the direction and patience about the timeline are not in conflict. The standard is real, the first hardware is real, and Home Assistant support is coming. None of that is here for me today.
So the plan is the unglamorous one: keep the Frigate box running, watch the Home Assistant release notes for camera support to land properly, and revisit this when there’s an actual Matter camera I can pair to my own hub and confirm — with a network capture, not a marketing claim — that nothing’s leaving the house. When that day comes, I’ll document it honestly. Until then, the holdout corner of my house stays exactly as local as the rest of it.
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