- Apple, Google, Amazon, and the Zigbee Alliance has announced that they are partnering to develop an open-source smart home standard
Three of the biggest tech companies (Apple, Google, Amazon) and the Zigbee Alliance are partnering to develop an open-source smart home standard to ensure that devices can work with each other. It would also make developing for the devices easier and more secure. The Zigbee Alliance board member companies including IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian are also joining the working group and will contribute to the project.
The goal of the project is to “enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.” And the project aims to make it easier for device manufacturers to build devices compatible with smart home and voice services like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, etc.
“I love this new smart home project. And all the comments about it. But the big deal here is that IKEA is on board to provide foundational tech advice to Amazon, Apple, and Google,” said Walt Mossberg in a tweet.
As part of the partnership, the companies are also setting up a group called Project Connected Home over IP. And an initial draft will be launched in late 2020.
The standard is expected to work with network connections like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Google will be contributing two of its market-tested and open-source smart home technologies, including Weave and Thread. Both of these technologies are built on IP and have been integrated into millions of homes.
“We’re joining Amazon, Apple and others to create Connected Home over IP, a new independent working group managed by the Zigbee Alliance (separate from the existing Zigbee 3.0/Pro protocol). Our goal is to bring together market-tested technologies to develop a new, open smart home connectivity standard based on Internet Protocol (IP). Google’s use of IP in home products dates back to the launch of Nest Learning Thermostat in 2011. IP also enables end-to-end, private and secure communication among smart devices, mobile apps, and cloud services,” wrote Google Nest VP of Engineering Nik Sathe and Google Nest principal engineer Grant Erickson in a blog post.
