Google, Amazon and Apple collaborate on standard for smart home devices

Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance have partnered to develop a new open standard for improving the connectivity of smart home devices.

Google and the Zigbee Alliance, among others, report the establishment of Connected Home over IP, a working group that is managed by the Zigbee Alliance and is incidentally separate from the existing Zigbee 3.0/Pro protocol. The aim of this collaboration is to bring together existing technologies that have proven themselves on the market in the form of a new standard based on the Internet protocol. Parties such as Samsung, Signify, IKEA and NXP Semiconductors are also involved in the project via the Zigbee Alliance.

This new connectivity standard will be royalty-free and should improve the compatibility of smart home products. This collaboration and the new standard should also make it easier for manufacturers to make products. According to the Zigbee Alliance, security is a fundamental design point in the new standard to be developed.

The working group takes an open source approach in developing the new universal connectivity protocol, with the intention of using existing technologies already released and whether or not they are adapted. That should speed up development. In the case of Google, these include Weave and Thread, both of which are IP-based. It also concerns Apple’s HomeKit and Amazon Alexa Smart Home.

Standardizing user interfaces is not a task for the workgroup. That means the parties have no intention of standardizing voice assistants, smart screens, or mobile and desktop apps.

It is still unknown when the new standard will see the light of day and the first devices based on it. The working group has set itself the goal of issuing a design specification and a preliminary implementation by the end of next year.