Apple has confirmed it has joined Amazon, Google, and others to form a new group that will develop and promote a royalty-free connectivity standard for connected home devices.
The idea behind the new standard is to increase compatibility amongst smart home products and put security at the forefront of their design.
Zigbee Alliance, alongside board members including IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify, Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian, will also be contributing to the project.
Known formally as “Project Connected Home over IP” (catchy!), the goal is to make the development of smart home technology more simple, and allow manufacturers to create technology that will become more compatible with other home tech and smartphones.
The new project wants to make smart home devices secure, reliable, and seamless.
Apple and others have said that the project will make communication across smart home devices, smartphone apps, and cloud services easier through IP-based networking technologies, adopting an open-source approach to create a unified connectivity protocol.
The project will initially work with market-leading smart home technologies from the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Zigbee Alliance, which will “accelerate the development of the protocol, and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.”
For consumers, this is great news.
The project will make it easier for manufacturers to build devices that can be compatible with Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google’s Assistant, and because the protocol will complement existing technologies, it’s likely older tech will benefit from the changes, too.
Those who want to find out more information about the new project can visit the new Project Connected Home over IP website, or check back to AppleMagazine regularly for updates.
Are you pleased to hear about the new standard? Let us know your thoughts over on social media and check back soon for more news and rumors on everything Apple, every week.
