Apple today announced that it had signed up with Amazon, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to form a new working group to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products.
Security will be a basic design tenet of this standard, said Apple. Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian are also onboard to join the working group and contribute to the project.
The goal of the “Connected Home over IP project” is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers, said Apple in a written statement.
With smart homes devices sales increasing, and the coming to light of cases of some of them being hacked, the time has come to develop a standard for such devices.
The new project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use, said Apple. 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.
The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol. The project intends to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance, and others. The decision to leverage these technologies is expected to accelerate the development of the protocol, and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.
The project aims to make it easier for device manufacturers to build devices that are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others. The planned protocol will complement existing technologies, and working group members encourage device manufacturers to continue innovating using technologies available today.
Project Connected Home over IP welcomes device manufacturers, silicon providers, and other developers from across the smart home industry to participate in and contribute to the standard. If you’d like to get involved or receive updates visit connectedhomeip.com.
The Zigbee Alliance was established in 2002. The Alliance collaborates to create and evolve universal open standards for the products transforming the way people live, work, and play. The Zigbee Alliance board of directors is made up of executives from Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Google, IKEA, The Kroger Co., LEEDARSON, Legrand, Lutron Electronics, MMB Networks, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, SmartThings, Somfy, Texas Instruments, and Wulian.