Ezviz aren’t a company you would have seen on this website before, due to the fact they don’t make HomeKit products. That looks to change soon though, following their annual product presentation in China this morning.
During the presentation, the company revealed plans for upgrades to some products to enable them to work with Matter and also Apple HomeKit, as well as their own EZVIZ Connect platform.
This included their A3 Hub, which uses Zigbee 3.0. The plan for the hub itself is to make it Matter-compliant, so that the company’s own Zigbee child devices will then be exposed to Matter, in much the same way that both Philips Hue and Aqara have done. This does not make the A3 Hub a Matter controller, however, so you can only add the company’s own Zigbee devices to it, which cover the usual areas like sensors, buttons, etc.
Much like the Aqara M2, the A3 can be wired to your network via an ethernet port on the device itself, and as it has a built-in speaker, it can also act as an alarm when triggered by connected devices.
As the hub will be Matter compatible, this means it can be added to Apple Home too, exposing the devices to HomeKit as standard, as long as the devices belong to a supported category. Speaking of HomeKit, the company also announced that their E6 cam will also work with HomeKit.
Currently, only the C6 variant is available, but if the E6 is anything like the existing models, not only will it offer HomeKit compatibility, but it could offer a 4mp Sony Starlight lens or 4K recording (the C6 offers variants for both specs), 360º Pan & Tilt, and 8GB built-in storage for on-device recording, amongst other features.
Even though Ezviz sells products in international markets, it remains to be seen whether these new Matter & HomeKit devices will be sold beyond China, but it’s interesting to see Matter added to a Chinese hub, which we’ve yet to see happen with Aqara’s Chinese model M2 hubs.
Thanks to Eric at Wavetech for the tipoff