Leading global appliance manufacturers (American Standard Heating and Air Conditioning, Arçelik, The Electrolux Group, Haier, GE Appliances, Samsung Electronics, and Trane Residential ) formed the Home Connectivity Alliance, which was debuted at the CES 2022.
As a standards organization, the alliance aims to enable connected device interoperability across different brands and build out common data models that will allow appliances to interoperate using a cloud-to-cloud connection. Many manufacturers provide connected devices that are only compatible within one brand’s platform. With interoperability, consumers will no longer be locked into one brand but can purchase devices from other brands.
In the smart home interoperability domain, there is also Matter, founded by Apple, Google, and Amazon, that aims to become the smart home standard. It focuses on the control of devices through a unified app or digital assistant. The Home Connectivity Alliance deals with creating use cases and data in a format that can be understood across brands. It remains to be seen, if they can contribute to avoiding too many siloed smart home ecosystems.
You can find more information at https://homeconnectivityalliance.org/ and https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/.
For a while, it looked like there could be one common standard for smart home devices, which all major players would support. Now we have yet another initiative, which could be an extension of the initial concept but may also bring further fragmentation of the market.
