Finally there seems to be a standard for smart home systems. Apple, Amazon and Google will jointly develop a universal protocol.
You could call it a breakthrough, to say the least. Finally there seems to be a universal standard for smart home systems. Apple, Amazon and Google have joined forces to achieve that. To be more precise, setting up the Connected Home is about IP-standard. This should make it a lot easier for manufacturers to develop equipment that doesn’t work with just one specific smart home ecosystem, but works with Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant.
Zigbee
Currently, the implementation of a certain smart home standard is still a costly affair for manufacturers. Moreover, making a choice for a certain system is always annoying, because you exclude some of your potential customers beforehand. One option, of course, is to simply support all standards, but that goes even further in the paperwork (and costs more development time). The Apple-Amazon-Google club is of course composed of the major players on the market and one of them will eventually become a universal standard. What makes the project even more likely to succeed is that the club of three is managed by the well-known Zigbee alliance. Google has also provided its Thread and Weave network application and protocol. It will be some time before the standard is really developed, think of two to three years. But after that, many will sigh a deep sigh of enlightenment as far as smart home is concerned.