Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance to develop new home IoT standard

  • December 24, 2019
  • imc

Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance have formed a working group to develop a royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products. Security will be a fundamental design tenet in the new standard. 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 joining the working group and will contribute to the project.

The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. 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.

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 is planned to complement existing technologies, and working group members encourage device manufacturers to continue innovating using technologies available today.

In a statement, Apple announced that the Connected Home over IP project welcomes device manufacturers, silicon providers, and other developers from across the smart home industry to participate in and contribute to the standard.