The Long Wait Is Over
For the legions of smart home tinkerers who've spent years coaxing Ring cameras, old thermostats, and off-brand bulbs into Apple's walled garden, May 4th, 2025 is a day worth celebrating. Homebridge 2.0 has officially launched — and it's bringing Matter support along for the ride.
Homebridge is free, open-source software that runs on a Raspberry Pi or spare computer and acts as a translation layer between Apple HomeKit and the thousands of smart home devices Apple never officially supported. Think of it as a universal adapter for your home: if a gadget exists, someone has probably written a Homebridge plugin to make it work with Siri.
Version 2.0 has been cooking in beta for over three years, which by open-source project standards is practically geological. The wait, it turns out, was worth it.
What's New in Homebridge 2.0
The headline feature is "initial groundwork for Matter support," as described by NorthernMan5, one of the project's GitHub core maintainers, in a post on the r/homebridge subreddit. This means Homebridge can now act as a Matter bridge in addition to its existing HomeKit bridge role.
In practical terms: Matter devices — the new cross-platform smart home standard backed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung — can now appear inside Apple Home through Homebridge. It's a significant shift. Until now, Homebridge was mostly a one-way street into HomeKit. Now it's becoming a more versatile hub that speaks the emerging universal language of smart home tech.
Matter, if you're not already living in a smart home rabbit hole, is the industry's attempt to end the fragmented mess of incompatible ecosystems. A Matter-certified device should, in theory, work with any platform — Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa — without needing a proprietary bridge or app. Homebridge 2.0 planting its flag in the Matter world means the open-source community now has a seat at that table.
Beyond Matter, the update includes other under-the-hood improvements that long-time users have been requesting, though the Matter bridge is clearly the most consequential addition for where smart home tech is heading.
Why This Matters for Smart Home Enthusiasts
For most mainstream users, smart home setup means buying whatever ecosystem your first device locked you into and hoping everything else plays along. Homebridge has always been the escape hatch for people who refuse to accept that constraint.
With 2.0, that escape hatch gets wider. As more manufacturers ship Matter-certified products, Homebridge users will be able to integrate them directly rather than waiting for a dedicated plugin. And for anyone already running a Homebridge instance, the upgrade path should be relatively smooth — the project's maintainers have been careful to document breaking changes during the long beta period.
The smart home space moves fast, and standards like Matter are still maturing. But Homebridge 2.0 signals that the open-source community isn't getting left behind — it's actively building bridges (pun intended) to wherever the industry is headed next.
Source: The Verge
