Chinese smart home specialist Aqara, despite building its early success on Zigbee, has been one of the biggest advocates of the Matter standard in the past couple of years.

And it has further ramped up its Matter smart home efforts by expanding its support to more than 50 types of Matter compatible devices, as well as making it much easier to get your Aqara devices singing and dancing within other Matter platforms.

Starting with the new device types and Aqara now supports a whole bunch of the categories that were introduced by the CSA in the Matter 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 updates, including – deep breath – robot vacuums, smoke and CO alarms, air quality sensors, leak, freeze, and rain sensors, curtains and shades, fans and air purifiers, air conditions and heat pumps, water valves and pumps, pressure sensors, solar panels and battery storage, vehicle chargers, washing machines and dryers, refrigerators, cooktops, hoods and surfaces, ovens and stoves, water heaters, and video players and speakers.

By my reckoning – and it’s hard to properly state this as it’s almost impossible to keep track – I think it makes Aqara one of, if not the most comprehensive backbones for a Matter system. Only SmartThings and possibly Home Assistant can match, or come close, in terms of the amount of device types supported.

What’s more, Aqara is making it possible to get these device types working within other ecosystems that don’t yet support them, through the Advanced Matter Bridging feature.

This feature – which was originally introduced with the Aqara Hub M3 but is now rolling out across the Aqara Matter hub board – lets you transfer automations and triggers from your Aqara smart home system, into other Matter platforms.

With those device types still in mind, therefore, you could create a virtual switch to kick start a robot vacuum and have it as part of a routine in a Google Home Matter setup.

Getting more advanced, you could have recognition and motion triggers from the likes of the new Aqara Camera Hub G5 Pro, act as initiators for subsequent actions across other Matter setups, or even have power consumption levels – monitored through Aqara’s automation engine – trigger routines on those setups too.

Aqara calls these Scenes and Signals and we’re told that they will show up in the likes of Apple Home, SmartThings and Alexa as virtual plugs and occupancy sensors.

As mentioned, it’s not just the M3 offering up these extra Advanced Matter Bridging bells and whistles; the likes of the Camera Hub G5 Pro, M100, Doorbell Camera Hub G410, M2, M1S (both gens), E1 and Camera Hub G3 are all getting involved too.

You’ll simply need to update your firmware to the latest 4.3.4 release and make sure your Aqara app is 5.1.4 or newer.

But that’s not it when it comes to cross-platform Matter action, as Aqara also announced that it is optimizing its Thread border routers to support Thread network sharing, which means they will be able join other Thread networks from other ecosystems, and that its border routers will also be able to communicate across different LANs.

The thing with Matter is, as I wrote in an op-ed back in January, is that it’s really up to the brands now to take advantage of the building blocks that the application layer provides for them.

Aqara is clearly on board with this mission and, when I asked the CSA’s Head of Technology, Chris LaPré, if he hoped that Aqara’s moves could inspire other brands to ramp up their Matter functionalities he said: “That’s a very easy answer… yes.”

The CSA needs brands to embrace and deploy Matter at its full capabilities; it is still a bit messy and a far cry from the seamless smart home system we all envisioned when Project Chip started making headlines a few years back.

But it’s moves like this from Aqara that will help to keep up momentum and drive the platform to a place where it needs to be.