A fresh Home Assistant OS install on a small board will no longer pull in the Matter Server app on its own. Pull request #188890 by RaHehl was merged into the development branch on 27 October 2026 at 17:00 Polish time. That branch is numbered 2026.11.0.dev0, so the change is headed for Home Assistant 2026.11.
What happened before
Since 2024, when onboarding found a Matter device on the network through zeroconf, Home Assistant installed and started the Matter Server app in the background without asking. On most hardware nobody noticed. On a Raspberry Pi 3 with 1 GB of RAM, of which 903 MB is visible to the system, the author found it made the machine unusable.
The pull request gives the numbers. With the Matter Server running, the load average sat around 4, and twice HTTP and SSH stopped answering until the board was power cycled. With the Matter integration disabled, the load dropped below 1 within a few minutes and HTTP answered in about 10 ms over a 12 minute test. While starting, the app used up to 183 MB of memory and more than one CPU core.
The Raspberry Pi 3 is below Home Assistant's documented minimum of 2 GB, but it still gets rpi3-64 images and the new installer still offers it.
What changes
Home Assistant now reads the host's physical memory before taking the automatic path. Below 1.5 GB, the Matter discovery is shown as a normal discovered integration instead, and installing the app is your decision, with progress shown while it installs. The same check covers a 1 GB Raspberry Pi 4 or a small virtual machine.
The limit is set below 2 GB on purpose, because a Raspberry Pi reports less memory than it has after reserving some for the GPU. The author added that a higher limit would also be fine, since 1.5 GB is likely tight as well.
Nothing changes on hosts with more memory: they keep installing the Matter Server automatically during onboarding when a Matter device is found.
Who it helps
Mostly people reusing an old Raspberry Pi 3 or a 1 GB board for a first try at Home Assistant, on a network that already has Matter devices from another platform. Until now that combination could freeze the setup before it was finished. If you want Matter on such a board, you can still add it from Settings > Devices & services, knowing it will compete for very little memory.