Google, Apple and Amazon are teaming to build an open source smart home standard 

While there’s no dearth of ‘good’ smart home products anymore, buying them is still a hassle. You must be very careful while picking up a smart home product to ensure it suits your ‘specific’ need and is also compatible with your existing devices. If not, you might come back home only to find, it’s less useful than you had anticipated, probably because it doesn’t work with your preferred voice assistant or can’t communicate with your fancy new TV. This is because almost every smart home product today sticks to a ‘standard’ which means universal connectivity is not a thing – at this point of time, at least.  

Things are going to change soon though since Google, Apple and Amazon are joining hands to ‘simplify’ smart home tech. These tech giants behind the Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and a plethora of smart devices under their banners, are teaming with others, including IKEA, Samsung, and Signify to build an open source smart home standard based on Internet Protocol (IP). The new standard, called Connected Home over IP, will be managed by the Zigbee Alliance. 

“While smart home devices are abundant, the lack of an industry-wide connectivity standard leaves people confused and frustrated when trying to understand what devices work with each smart home ecosystem. It also places a heavy burden on manufacturers to make sure all devices are compatible with each other,” Google writes on its official blog.  

“Our goal is to bring together market-tested technologies to develop a new, open smart home connectivity standard based on Internet Protocol (IP).” 

While details of this new and upcoming standard are scarce at this point of time – an initial draft of the stanard will be released sometime in late 2020 – Google says that it will be ‘contributing’ two of its IP-based technologies, aka Weave and Thread, that it has ‘integrated into millions of homes around the world’ to the standard. Others are likely to do the same. The goal will be to allow universal compatibility, that would be independent of existing technologies. It would also apparently be more secure and private, ‘enabling end-to-end, private and secure communication among smart devices, mobile apps, and cloud services.’ 

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