Apple, Google, and Amazon are normally fierce competitors, but today all three companies announced that they'd be teaming up on a new initiative.
Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance have formed a group to create a new standard to increase compatibility between smart home products. This new standard will be royalty-free and will have place a heavy focus on security, and its goals will be to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.
Called the Connected Home over IP project, the effort will use contributions from smart home devices made by Amazon, Apple, Google, the Zigbee Alliance, and others. The group intends to take an open-source approach to developing its standard. It also expects that compliant devices will need to have support for either Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Thread.
In addition to Amazon, Apple, and Google, the Connected Home over IP project will include Zigbee Alliance board member companies like Ikea, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian.
The group aims to release a draft specification in late 2020.
With so many different smart home devices and platforms out there, it can be kind of frustrating to keep track of all of them and make sure the devices you're buying work with all of your existing smart home accessories. It's nice to see major companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google coming together to form a smart home alliance, but we're likely still a little ways out from anything concrete coming out of this group, so it's tough to really know what we're going to get from it.
