Apple, Amazon, Google, and Zigbee Alliance explore new smart home standard

Apple, Amazon, Google and the Zigbee Alliance have formed a new working group focused around ‘Project Connected Home over IP’, exploring the development and promotion of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to boost compatibility among smart home products. The protocol has been designed with security as a fundamental principle. The aim of the Connected Home over IP project, which has been built around the shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use, is to make it easy for manufacturers to develop and increase the compatibility for consumers. The project would allow communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services to define a particular set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.