Amazon, Apple, Google and other companies come together to create a single smart home standard

Connected Home over IP Working Group Lead by Zigbee Alliance.
Smart home technologies have been developing for several years, but market development is constrained by the lack of a single standard. Consumers have to figure out whether individual components and household appliances can work in concert to form a complete ecosystem. In turn, manufacturers who want to ensure broad compatibility are forced to spend more resources on development and testing than would be necessary if there was a common standard.

Google has announced that it is joining Amazon, Apple, and other companies to create Connected Home over IP, a new independent workgroup led by the Zigbee Alliance (separate from the existing Zigbee 3.0 / Pro protocol). The goal of the working group participants is to combine proven technologies in the market to develop a new open standard for connecting to a smart home based on the IP protocol. The protocol will allow end-to-end, private and secure communication between smart devices, mobile applications and cloud services.

Developers and consumers will benefit from the new universal smart home standard. The first will simplify development and reduce costs, and the second will facilitate the selection and use of components of a smart home.