Group Group will develop Single Connectivity Standard for Smart-Home Products
After years of failed efforts to dominate the smart home market with their own products and standards, tech giants Amazon, Apple, and Google, along with the Zigbee Alliance have agreed to collaborate on a set of common code to enable an array of smart home products to function together. Connected smart-home products range from cameras and thermostats to digital assistants.
The projected “Connected Home over IP” approach will be developed through a new Working Group that plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. It will be an IP-based protocol so it can connect directly to the internet rather than require a proprietary hub; it will be open-source and royalty-free and allow for end-to-end secure communication, and it will work with core standards like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use. The new standard should initially appear in late 2020, making 2021 the start of a new era in smart home tech. The initial push appears to be to work with digital voice assistants.
The fact that all the tech giants, along with Zigbee Alliance board member companies (IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify, Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian) are also on board to join the Working Group and contribute to the project, is great news for manufacturers as well as consumers.
Smart devices produced by Apple, Google, and Amazon have mostly used different connectivity standards, but with a single standard jointly developed, consumers will soon be able to buy, for example, an Amazon Alexa and a Google Nest thermostat and have them work seamlessly together, where Alexa talks to Nest. Consumers will also be able to have a single app on their phone that talks to every smart home device.
Google will contribute its Thread and Weave protocols; Amazon will contribute its Alexa system, Apple its HomeKit approach and Zigbee is to add its Dotdot approach. The mandate of the working group is to take these inputs and develop a single standard using existing internet technology.
The standard will apply specifically to connectivity; it will not standardize features or merge products. The goal of the new standard is to “customers can be confident that their device of choice will work in their home and that they will be able to set up and control it with their preferred system”.
Apple, Google, and Amazon have promised that their current devices will continue to work individually; in the future, customers will need new devices to benefit from the total inter-operability.
This unprecedented collaboration will be beneficial to both product manufacturers and consumers. The bottom line is that IF the alliance holds together, this will be a "win" for everyone.