William Gallagher
The "Project CHIP" alliance between Apple, Amazon, and Google, is set to start certifying manufacturers' compatible devices in late 2021, meaning the first may be on sale at the end of the year.
Following their December 2019 announcement, the partnership between all of the major smart home firms, is reportedly expecting bear fruit later in 2021. Alongside Apple, Amazon, and Google, Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP) includes the Zigbee Alliance — which has just revealed a milestone.
As first spotted by The Verge, the Zigbee Alliance has said in a webinar that participating manufacturers are going to get their home devices certified by late 2021. The expected devices include lighting, blinds, door locks, and more, and these may all be available starting in time for the 2021 holidays.
The smart home companies have been collaborating on simplifying automation, by creating a home networking standard. It would not replace HomeKit, but rather allow communication between different networking technologies.
Those chiefly include using Bluetooth LE for setting up devices, Wi-Fi for streaming video, and also Thread for when devices need to share short bursts of information. Thread is already being increasingly supported, with Apple including it in the HomePod mini, and third-party companies believing it will become significant.
Project CHIP has previously been delayed by the coronavirus. The new detail that certification will start toward the end of 2021, but once new devices support it, manufacturers will also be able to create bridges to help older systems work too.
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16 Comments
Common standard for collection of private/sensitive info?
That's awesome! I really hope that by making it possible to make one IoT "thing" compatible with all three big players, it will HOPEFULLY lead to more, better devices. I hope it will also lead the 3 companies (A, A, G- Apple, Amazon, Google) to step up their game, so to speak, to implement more features on their end. Like Apple adding more options to HomeKit. I also hope that more networking companies get on board as well. I just got some new Linksys WiFi 6 mesh routers for my parents' house last year. Linksys added HomeKit Router support to some of their mesh nodes, but not all of them. I wonder why not? It would make it SO much easier for my parents to control them with Siri. "Hey, Siri, turn on the guest wifi." "Hey Siri, it's dinner, pause network access", etc. Also make it easier for my parents to see stuff on the AppleTV, if they decide to start getting some smart devices like lights/switches, thermostats, or controller for the sprinklers, etc. Another thing I'd like Linksys to implement is support for more options for the USB port on the routers. They are VERY limited in the options. It's hard drives only, and only drives supporting NTFS and FAT. Not very useful for Macs, or for networks that want large drives for, say, NAS. It would be great if they could add better NAS/Sharing options- like not just on the network, but being able to access the HDD over the internet. Maybe being able to use the Files App on the iPhone/iPad to be able to access the NAS, so that I can unload a lot of the photos and 4k video that's clogging up my iPhones storage. But, that's obviously not the point of this specific article.
I love bear fruit!
Will be interesting to see if this project delivers on its promises