Tech giants partner up to create a universal smart home standard

Tech giants Amazon, Google, Apple, and the Zigbee Alliance announced a partnership to focus on making smart homes easier for everyone.

All the major companies who are into smart home products are competing with each other to attain supremacy in the arena. But this competition has rendered the smart home space confusing with a wide variety of products.

According to the IDC report, “market for smart home devices is expected to grow 23.5% year over year in 2019 to nearly 815 million device shipments.” Therefore, it is essentially becoming a need to standardize these products so that these devices can all talk to each other. And that is the reason for the recent partnership between these companies.

Currently, the situation is that, if a user walks into a store to buy a smart lock, he would have to figure out if he needs to buy a lock that works with Amazon Echo, Google Home or Apple Homekit as each of these devices are specifically designed.

And this is not just the problem that users alone deal with; the companies who build smart or IoT devices also face the same issue as they’ll have to decide upon which outset they want in order to support various connectivity methods provided by Amazon, Apple or Google. And if they decide to go with all the connectivity methods they’ll have to update their device throughout its lifetime to ensure safety across all platforms.

The unified approach by the tech giants is named “Project Connected Home over IP” aims to create a new standard for the smart home so that users can buy products knowing that they’ll be able to use it with the systems back home. Users will able to distinguish products made by Project Connected Home over IP with the help of a unique logo that will be marked on gadget boxes.