The smart home is a mess, and now the biggest names in the business are joining forces to tidy it up. Apple, Amazon, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance have announced they’re forming what can best be described as The Smart Home Avengers, with an endgame of having all your smart home gadgets play together. After years of the three big tech companies laying out competing visions for their smart home ecosystems, though, this new team-up is an admission; Amazon, Google and Apple have each failed to make this work on their own terms.
The coalition says it will build a new connectivity standard based on Internet Protocol (IP) to ensure different devices from different manufacturers can talk to one another. As the group put it in its announcement: “smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use." Project Connected Home over IP (apparently the best name these titans of industry could come up with) at least sets out its goals plainly: you should be able to buy any smart home gadget safe in the knowledge it will talk to every other device in your home, securely. The fact it’s based on IP means you should, in theory, be able to connect everything to the internet, rather than going through a hub.
This alliance may be critical to the future of the smart home, and proof that no single company has managed to dominate this space. We’ve seen these types of unions form and fall by the wayside, but the fact that Apple, Google and Amazon are all sat at the same table provides some hope – and an acknowledgement that everyone has failed to own this space.
Apple has generally kept its distance from the other two companies, choosing to walk a more privacy-conscious path with HomeKit. But this has been a double-edged sword, as stricter security demands on device partners have stymied the levels of growth enjoyed by Amazon and Google. For example, Apple demands that some processing takes place locally on an iPhone running its Home app or a smart speaker-hub like the HomePod, limiting how much gets shared to the cloud.
The announcement of the Working Group failed to address these questions. For example, will there still be different requirements for hardware partners when working with Apple HomeKit? There’s clearly a tension between the way Apple operates and the way Amazon and Google do, and it will be interesting to see if the Project Connected Home over IP group is able to reconcile these differences.
Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant use a cloud-to-cloud protocol, while Apple demands much of HomeKit’s communications to take place locally and this decision has already had major repercussions for both the competency (of, for instance, Siri) and the privacy complications that come from placing voice assistant-accessing microphones in people’s homes.
It’s likely that this new standard, however it shakes out, will need to satisfy some of Apple’s existing HomeKit requirements, which is good news for all smart home users in the long term. But it’s also worth noting that Apple could benefit the most from joining this alliance, as despite having huge reach with iOS, it currently trails the other two in the number of devices on offer. It’s also yet to launch its own budget smart speaker.
Apple has been reticent to open up its smart home in the same way as rivals. Amazon and Google have built businesses on collecting user data, and see the smart home as an extension of how they learn about our behaviour and spending habits. Apple is less interested in this and has instead prided itself on putting privacy first at the expense of aggressive growth.
Take HomeKit Secure Video, its new way to encrypt all videos on a HomeKit hub and secure them in the cloud – it’s one way for Apple to take steps forward while keeping its focus on privacy. How will Project Connected Home over IP affect initiatives like this? These are all questions yet to be answered and while current Apple HomeKit users won’t be affected, even the fact of Apple’s involvement signals that the Amazon-Google approach may already have won.
Zigbee Alliance also brings A-lister board members including Ikea, Samsung, and Signify, creator of Philips Hue. Seeing Zigbee’s name on the list is especially encouraging: not only does it have major names attached, it has a huge vested interest in the future of smart home interoperability – more so, in fact, than Apple, Amazon or Google.
But more names means more pieces to try and fit together. Apple has its HomeKit platform; Amazon has Alexa; and Google says it’s bringing Thread, Wave and the Google Assistant to the party. (No mention of Brillo – RIP). Meanwhile, the Zigbee protocol, which in the latest version creates an encrypted mesh network operating at 2.4GHz, is already used in devices from Philips Hue, and even some Amazon Echo speakers.
In a press release, Apple said the planned protocol will “complement existing technologies,” suggesting the plan isn’t to eliminate any of the above mentioned standards but find a new common ground between them.
The group will first focus on physical safety devices such as smart locks, connected smoke alarms, smart plugs, security systems and heating/air conditioning devices. Yes, it probably means you’ll need to buy new devices that take advantage of the protocol, but don’t expect those to start hitting the market until 2021 at the earliest. While it’s clear the next 18 months will involve considerable compromises, it’s clear that this will soon be close to mandatory for anyone looking to work in the smart home space.
“I say there is little risk for the three ecosystems because this interoperability will not necessarily impact which ecosystem consumers will pick,” says Carolina Milanesi, analyst at Creative Strategies. “The opportunity in the smart home is still huge and lowering the barrier of entry for mass market consumers starts with better interoperability, consistency of experience when it comes to set up, updates and so on and of course security. We now need to see if the promise of having something in place next year is fulfilled.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
