Amazon, Apple, Google, and Zigbee Alliance are teaming up to form a new working group that aims to develop an open standard for smart home devices.
The new working group is also referred to as “Project Connected Home over IP“. You can also find a dedicated website for that.
Basically, with this new working group, these tech giants are trying to develop a common connectivity standard which can be used for all the smart home devices.
With this open standard, the devices will be easily compatible with each other no matter how different they are. This working group also aims to develop the standard with an open-source approach.
So, every company involved can contribute their share of technologies to make the open standard as powerful as possible while being free and royalty-free.
Not just for the consumers, this will also help manufacturers to expand compatibility easily. For instance, the manufacturers can make a device that is compatible with all the digital assistants (Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and others) using the open standard.
Technically, it will define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.
In the press release by Apple, they also mentioned that Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian will be also contributing to the project.