Image: Flic 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... Continue reading...