This report was 1st published on our sister Site, The Internet Of All Things.
Apple today announced that it had signed up with Amazon, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to form a new working group to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products.
Security will be a basic design tenet of this standard, said Apple. 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, said Apple in a written statement.
With smart homes devices sales increasing, and the coming to light of cases of some of them being hacked, the time has come to develop a standard for such devices.
The new project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use, said Apple. 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.
