Alright, so we talked a lot internally as well as reached out to a few contacts of hub manufacturers that support Zigbee/Z-Wave/Matter in the EU to understand what they’re seeing in terms of protocol usage and ultimately, while Zigbee is still the most popular on their hubs, they both said that Thread/Matter adaptation is skyrocketing and if they were us, they’d go with Thread/Matter.
This is what we’re also seeing here in the US. I ran the sales data the other day and in the Latest 26 weeks, our Zigbee dimmer was still our top seller by $100k USD over Matter/Thread. However, when I switched to latest 12, latest 4 and latest week, the Thread/Matter switch took the lead, which was a surprise to me since it’s still a pre-order item whereas the Zigbee version has been in market for 2+ years.
So, with the sales data and the fact that, IMO, Thread/Matter allows us to reach more customers (giving us the best chance to hit MOQ’s) by reaching the Apple, Amazon, Google and existing, “power users” using Home Assistant and Homey (and maybe SmartThings? Idk it it’s that popular out there), we decided to start with Thread/Matter.
In addition the Thread/Matter switch has 80% or so of the features of our Zigbee switch + Thread/Matter allows for OTA updates (which work great) and not all Zigbee hubs allow Zigbee OTA, so we feel like by the time the Thread/Matter switch is in-market, it should be on par with our Zigbee switch and if there is an issue (knock on wood) once launched, we can easily OTA a fix.
Sorry for all the run-on sentences, I’m typing on my phone as I am riding in the car to the water park lol
Next steps are to lock down the distributor and put up the product page. I think we should be able to start pre-orders within the next couple of weeks!