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Apple, Google, Amazon, and Zigbee Alliance Join to Develop Open Standard for Smart Home Devices

Apple has joined with Amazon, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance on Wednesday announced a new working group 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 “Connected Home over IP” project is intended to make it easier for device manufacturers to build compatible smart home and voice services, including Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and others by defining a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.

The working group aims to release a draft specification and a preliminary reference open source implementation by late 2020.

For more information, visit the Project Connected Home over IP website.

Chris Hauk

Chris is a Senior Editor at Mactrast. He lives somewhere in the deep Southern part of America, and yes, he has to pump in both sunshine and the Internet.