Apple, Amazon, 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 for smart home products, with a focus on increased compatibility, security, and simplified development for manufacturers.
Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify, Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian will also contribute to the project.
The so-called “Project Connected Home over IP” aims to make it easier for device manufacturers to build devices that are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and others by defining a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.
The working group has a goal to release a draft specification and a preliminary reference open source implementation in late 2020.
More details are available on the Project Connected Home over IP website.