Amazon and Google have an existing system that allows third-party apps to connect with their devices. Apple has a less open standard and is compatible with fewer third party devices. According to MarketWatch, the smart home market is expected to grow at 13.08 percent to $124.57 billion by 2025 globally.
While Apple has so far touted HomeKit as the best way to ensure security and privacy of smart home devices, the company has now agreed to work with other tech giants on an open standard for smart home security.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance join forces to develop open standard for smart home devices
Matter is a new global, open-source standard that aims to simplify the smart home ecosystem by allowing internet-connected devices from different manufacturers to simply and securely communicate. This represents an important collaboration between competing companies working towards a common goal: to advance the smart home and make it more consumer-friendly. Until now, Matter has been a buzzword and nebulous vendor promises, but we're finally starting to see some real movement.
Smart home device manufacturers use a GitHub repository to create an open-source reference design and software development kit (SDK). As a result, they can market products faster, more reliably, and more consistent with the new smart home standard.
Project Connected Home over IP is a new Working Group within the Zigbee Alliance. This Working Group plans to 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 tenet.Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance joined together to promote the formation of the Working Group. Zigbee Alliance board member companies IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian are also on board to join the Working Group and contribute to the project.
Today there is no widely adopted open standard for smart home which is built upon IP and yet IP is the protocol of the internet and is the most common network layer used in our homes and offices. With IP, messages can be routed across networks independent of the physical and link layers underlying them and there are ample battle tested algorithms and infrastructure for performing routing, switching and firewalling in robust and resilient ways. On top of IP, you inherit well-known transport protocols like TCP and UDP. Consequently, IP is an ideal way to deliver end-to-end security and privacy in communication between a device and another device, app, or service.There are a large number of IP-bearing networks today, designed for different use cases. Since the protocol is built upon IP, its message traffic should be able to flow seamlessly across different kinds of networks.Many Smart Home devices use proprietary protocols today, requiring them to be tethered to a home network using dedicated proxies and translators. By building upon IP, some of these devices may instead be able to connect directly with standardized networking equipment.
There are numerous smart home communication protocols in use today including Bluetooth, BLE, sub-GHzThread, WiFi, zigbee, and Z-wave. The new Working Group is not necessarily looking to replace these protocols, but to provide a new communication standard for smart home devices based on Internet Protocol (IP). According to a webpage dedicated to the Working Group initiative:
Google is announcing Project Connected Home over IP, a new Working Group alongside industry partners such as Amazon, Apple and the Zigbee Alliance (separate from the existing Zigbee 3.0/PRO protocol). The project aims to build a new standard that enables IP-based communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services. Device manufacturers, silicon providers, and other developers are invited to join the working group and contribute existing open-source technologies into the initiative to accelerate its development so customers and device makers can benefit sooner.
Connected Home over IP is a recently announced, joint effort by Apple, Google, Amazon, and the Zigbee Alliance to define a connectivity standard for smart home products. To accelerate this initiative, Apple has open sourced parts of its core technology for smart home connectivity.
Matter has more advantages than just this interoperability and open connectivity. While Matter uses local networks like Wi-Fi and Thread, it works completely offline. This means that even if your ISP has issues, you can still control your smart home. The standard is also open source and royalty-free, making it easy for companies to join in on the system and get their products up to speed.
You read that right. The three biggest tech giants, who rarely agree on anything, will soon be working together in the name of communication. More specifically, Human/AI communication. With the rise of voice search continuing to show no signs of slowing, The Big 3 has recognized the need for a universal language- an open standard for smart home devices.
An announcement in December 2019 was welcome news to many in smart home circles: that all the major smart home manufacturers and developers were getting together to produce a standard way for smart devices to speak to each other. This is called Connected Home over IP.
Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Google, SmartThings, and the Connectivity Standards Alliance came together in 2019 to develop and promote an interoperable, secure connectivity standard for the future of the smart home. This gave rise to Matter, a new royalty-free, IPv6-based connectivity standard defining the application layer deployed on devices with Wi-Fi support, Thread and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).
An Apple statement published just before Christmas noted that Apple, Amazon, Google, Zigbee Alliance and people from other companies have formed a working group (the snappily-named Connected Home over IP project), to develop an open standard for smart home devices.
Back in 2019, we learned about a joint effort by Amazon, Apple, Google, and the hundreds of companies in the Zigbee Alliance whose aim is to deliver a set of open global standards for digital products in the Internet of Things category. It's an ambitious project, and it's predicated on the idea that the smart home market's biggest barrier for mainstream adoption is the fragmented ecosystem that makes it difficult for devices from various vendors to work together in a reliable and secure way, if at all.
The fully open Matter 1.0 standard will allow for compatibility between smart home devices. Matter does not create a new communications technology, but instead uses existing standards in the form of Ethernet, WiFi and Thread.
Doing a little number crunching in the report, based on the hyper-granular data in the Transforma Insights IoT Forecast Database, we found that smart home applications will account for 40% of all IoT devices by 2030 (up from 37% in 2020). The smart home is growing even faster than the overall IoT market, particularly between now and 2025. A key part of the growth over the next ten years is in the increasing availability of standardised open ecosystems that simplify the process of developing IoT devices and provide certainty for the end user over interoperability. The connected home is continuing to move away from closed systems based on single vendors. Matter is a critical element in this, and Thread also to a lesser extent. 2ff7e9595c
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