Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance and board members form working group to develop open standard for smart home devices

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Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that 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. 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 are also onboard to join the working group and contribute to the project.

The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.

The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol. The project intends to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance, and others. The decision to leverage these technologies is expected to accelerate the development of the protocol, and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.

The project aims to make it easier for device manufacturers to build devices that are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others. The planned protocol will complement existing technologies, and working group members encourage device manufacturers to continue innovating using technologies available today.

Project Connected Home over IP welcomes device manufacturers, silicon providers, and other developers from across the smart home industry to participate in and contribute to the standard.

If you’d like to get involved or receive updates visit connectedhomeip.com.

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Came here just for this as well. I wonder if there’s some way HA can inject themselves into this conversation?

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This could be a big deal if they make something of it. i haven’t read their intentions yet, but I hope local control is part of it?
@balloob, get your foot in the door :grinning:

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I just switched from X10 / Activehome Pro to Z wave and Hassio. Can I pick technology or what?!?

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It will be years before/if this has any results though. I’m basically all in on Z-wave myself. If a real open source, local control, standard develops, that’d be great.

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Years? We got already some code to dive in and integrate into HA

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I saw that and meant to post here! This is just for HomeKit devices though, and only meant for testing. Still, it’s a positive that Apple is releasing anything.
The new standard presumably won’t be the current HomeKit release since they need everyone else on board.

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At this point, zwave is almost exactly that. I’d have a hard time believing that vendors like Apple and Amazon would suddenly stop trying to suck people into their walled ecosystems, but who knows, I’ll watch. Even then, I’d prefer something that didn’t run over IP for security and battery life reasons so would probably stick to zwave… Anyhow, will be interesting to watch.