Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee team up to develop smart devices standard

Three giants of the global technology industry – Amazon, Apple and Google – have set up a working group with the Zigbee Alliance to develop and promote the adoption of a royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart products.

The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. It is built around a common belief that smart devices should be secure, reliable and seamless to use.

The project aims to enable communication across devices, mobile apps and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.

The industry working group says it will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol. It 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 and Google’s Assistant.

The planned protocol will complement existing technologies, and working group members encourage device manufacturers to continue innovating using technologies available today.

The Connected Home over IP project intends to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from the Silicon Valley giants, and 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 on board to join the working group and contribute to the project.