As smart home gadgets become increasingly popular, it’s getting difficult for manufacturers to support Apple, Google and Amazon’s varying connection standards. Because of this, the three tech giants are now partnering with the Zigbee Alliance to create a universal standard.
The Zigbee Alliance is a board of members from big-name companies like Ikea, Samsung’s Smart Things, Signify and others that is working to create royalty-free and secure smart home connection standard.
The main goal of this partnership is to simplify the manufacturing process for gadgets, while also simplifying things for consumers. Ideally, this will mean that in the future users won’t need to look for the “works with Alexa, Google Assistant, or Homekit” tags on products since everything will work with all three platforms.
The standard is so far labelled under the working title ‘Connected Home over IP.’ You can find out a bit more about it on the project’s website.
The group says that by leveraging existing technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance, it will be able to bring this new standard to market quickly while also making sure that it’s secure.
Source: Apple, Google, Connected Home over IP
