Flic is ready to control all your Matter devices

Shortcut Labs has been openly working toward the goal of turning its smart home hubs - the Flic Hub LR and the Flic Hub Mini - into Matter controllers for quite a while, and now the company tells The Verge it has done it. On Friday, Shortcut will release an update that, according to the company, lets its devices easily act as independent hubs for Matter devices without being part of the ecosystems from companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, or Samsung.

It's a compelling idea: a way to build out a smart home without turning to one of the big tech companies and the privacy concerns and attempts at lock-in that come with that. Part of the promise of the Matter standard is that it gives users freedom of choice, but we've still mostly had to use at least one of those big ecosystems. Flic's Matter controller update hints at a fuller version of that promise.

Shortcut Labs cofounder Joacim Westlund Prändel wrote in an email to The Verge that while the Flic with Matter can (for instance) control Apple Home devices after they're paired with Flic, it's not quite a two-way street. You can't, for example, add a Flic device to the Apple Home app using Matter. You can, however, add Flic 2 buttons to Apple's app through the devices' already-existing HomeKit integration (though only with the Flic Hub LR, as the Hub Mini isn't HomeKit certified).

"You have to use our products to control other Matter things," Prändel told me in an interview, "but at least you won't be at all dependent on any privacy concerns or any big tech." Shortcut Labs doesn't sync device data with any cloud servers, CTO Oskar Öberg, who was also in the interview, wrote in an email afterward. (You can review the Flic privacy policy here.)

No new hardware or other purchase is necessary; Matter controller functionality is coming to Shortcut's hubs as a free update starting on Friday. And every Flic product is getting Matter support, said Öberg. He added that the company's controller will "literally support everything that is in the Matter standard."

Creating a Matter controller also allows the company's Flic Twist, a smart button with a dial that's useful for things like dimming lights or controlling smart blinds, to work with other products that use the standard. That's because Matter doesn't already support devices like the Twist. "In effect, our Flic Twist is the first rotational thing that you can do with Matter, which I think is really cool," Prändel said.

Öberg says one thing his team wanted to do is make setting up a device less opaque compared to the experience on other platforms, where a device can fail to onboard and it's difficult to figure out why. But when you set a Matter device up through the Flic app, you can see what's going on throughout the automated process, as shown in the screen recording above, making it easier to troubleshoot failures.