Apple, Amazon, Google and Zigbee Alliance will develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design principle. The members of the Zigbee Alliance are companieas such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian. This is great news for HomeKit users, as it should mean that a lot more HomeKit compatible products will become available.
The project will be based on four existing proprietary standards:
- Amazon’s Alexa Smart Home
- Apple’s HomeKit
- Google’s Weave
- Zigbee Alliance’s Dotdot data models
It will be interesting to see what the fruits of this cooperation will be. We’ll probably not see any products using this new standard before 2021.