The Automatic setting only allows devices to talk to a manufacturer whitelist of connections for things like firmware updates. The other two options are self-evident.
I've found that "Restrict to Home" occasionally causes problems with older devices.
It’s rightfully overlooked now because HomeKit Secure Routers are basically dead.
I actually have a router that supports it, but I don’t dare turn it on because I have no confidence on it continuing to exist and the migration path back off it looks like a pain.
I wonder if things have changed since that article was published a year-and-half ago, because my eero, with the firmware from a few days ago, still supports it.
I assume it’s in some kind of maintenance support mode. Actually removing support from routers would be a nightmare for anyone who’s set up their home by pairing devices through a HomeKit router - all their HomeKit devices would become unpaired.
Matter turned into a cluster fuck of devices. Use you're android phone to provision a device and connect it to your setup, most people use Google Home or homeassistant, smartthings is also an option, maybe others. But it's only to onboard the device for the most part. It'll still connect to your WiFi, give you next to no visibility as to what's going on in a failure and no interface to control it should your controller go down.
It's also not very well supported in things like homeassistant, despite what they say.
I’ve only got a handful of Matter devices, but haven’t experienced any problems with them. Have had them connected to HomeKit for a year or more, and got around to connecting them to Home Assistant last week - I was actually very impressed at how seamless it was to connect them to Home Assistant (generate pairing code in Apple Home, copy/paste into HA, done) - they’re now all directly connected to both HA and HomeKit and seem entirely functional on both.
I hoped so, I was wildly disappointed. In my experience so far Matter sucks just as much as what came before - unreliable connections, slow transfer, odd compatibility issues. The best IoT devices in my mind are still WiFi with HomeKit support - I can trivially block them at the router to keep them from phoning home.
Matter is that. However, version support varies by controller: some type of devices supported in one, but not in another. Multi-admin is supported, so that's good.
