Amazon, Apple and Google join forces with Zigbee Alliance to set an open smart home standard

The network standards behind IoT devices have been chaotic, and they are not compatible with each other, which makes some standards valid for this series of devices, but completely invalid for other series of devices. Amazon, Apple, and Google are currently working together with the Zigbee Alliance to solve this problem, thereby greatly reducing the burden on hardware and software developers of IoT devices. Of course, they also have the intention to participate in the development of IoT device standards.

It is interesting that these companies decided to join forces to establish IoT standards for the following reasons:

1. Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home brands are also well-known. Although Apple’s Siri is currently in the downturn in the competition between the former two, because of the amazing amount of existing Apple devices, its potential consumer market cannot be ignored. So in this way, the three companies’ willingness to work together is also very surprising.

2. The Zigbee Alliance, which has a long history in the Internet of Things industry, also has its own Internet of Things standard. The standard is ZigBee IEEE 802.15.4. It uses the 2.4 GHz frequency band and supports the self-healing mesh network. We need this standard because, without such a unified IoT communication and control standard, our IoT devices are destined to fail. The “connect every home based on IP address” scheme may be the first step towards a unified standard.

The alliance is actively pushing the standard to open source because the open-source can greatly reduce the huge workload required to maintain the standard and IoT devices, and these private maintainers can also help expand the market.

“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.” This protocol is based on the protocols used by current smart hardware devices. Because of this, software and hardware developers can more easily develop compatibility devices from Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google’s Assistant service. For users, it also means that they can finally buy devices from different hardware developers but can use unified services.