Apple, Amazon, Google and the Zigbee Alliance are establishing a working group tasked with the creation of a royalty-free connectivity standard smart home devices.
According to the official announcement, the project’s goal is boosting compatibility among smart home products so that consumers have an easier time putting together a connected home comprised of interoperable smart devices from different vendors.
Apple already uses its own HomeKit framework for the connected home that so far hasn’t suffered from privacy invasions like other smart home systems out there, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that security is being singled out as “a fundamental design tenet” for this project.
The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims 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.
In creating a unified connote Zigbee Alliance and others so that vendors are able to engineer and market smart devices that are interoperable and compatible with popular voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and others
You can find out more about the initiative at connectedhomeip.com.
Aside from Apple, Google and Amazon, the Zigbee Alliance includes board member companies like IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy and Wulian.