David Hanak The giants of the technology industry dealing with smart home features are putting their heads together to come up with a universal and open standard that should advance the capabilities and possibilities of smart home accessories.
Apple, Google and Amazon are building a new initiative that aims to develop a completely new and above all open standard for smart home devices, which should in the future guarantee that all smart home accessories will fully and seamlessly work together, their development will be for manufacturers simpler and easier to use for end users. Every smart device, whether it will fall into the Apple HomeKit ecosystem, Google Weave or Amazon Alexa, should work together with all the other products that will be developed under this initiative.
In addition to the aforementioned companies, members of the so-called Zigbee Alliance, which includes Ikea, Samsung and its SmartThings division or Signify, the company behind the Philips Hue product line, will also be involved in this project.
The initiative aims to come up with a concrete plan by the end of next year, and the standard as such should be concretized the year after. The newly established working group of companies is called Project Connected Home over IP. The new standard should include the technologies of all involved companies and their own solutions. It should thus support both platforms as such (e.g. HomeKit) and should be able to use all available assistants (Siri, Alexa...)
This initiative is also very important for developers, who would have a uniform standard in hand, according to which they could follow when developing applications and add-ons without worrying about possible incompatibility with some platforms. The new standard should work alongside other standardized communication protocols such as WiFi or Bluetooth.
More specific outlines of the cooperation are not yet known. However, any initiative of this style suggests a potential positive impact on developers and manufacturers as well as users. Combining all the smart devices in the home into one functional unit, regardless of the supported platform, sounds great. How it will be revealed in a year at the earliest. The first in line should be devices focusing on security, i.e. various alarms, fire detectors, camera systems, etc.
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Amaya Toman Source: The Verge
Two years before they even create a standard? Oh, I was hoping it would go faster :(