By The 8-1 Qi2 charger announced by Anker during CES 2024. | Image: Nathan Edwards / The Verge
Last year, you couldn’t mention CES without bringing up Matter. It was a pivotal year for the smart home standard, as big names like Samsung, GE, and Amazon promised better interoperability between their devices and a world of sensors, appliances, and accessories. But that promise largely started and ended with smart home tech.
This year, things were a little different at CES: the idea of making products work nicely across ecosystems bled into other areas of the showcase and rippled across a range of different devices — even putting rivals on the same page to better serve users.
Google, for instance, revealed several updates to Android that show a clear push toward interoperability. One of Google’s biggest updates was to Nearby Share,…