Homekit: How Apple Plans To Dominate the Smart Home

How many tech companies does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

As many as want to do it. Because like it or not, they are focused on growth and they think your home or apartment represents a truly mouth-watering opportunity.

The consumer has already conclusively demonstrated that he/she/it will happily trade information and money for convenience. Privacy is a concern, but many tech firms have already concluded that's more of a marketing task than a regulatory challenge. Say all the right things about respect for personal information and you are, ahem, home free. Well, not free to the consumer, who is going to pay a bundle for both the connectivity - and for having someone like Apple manage it for them.

Google, Apple et al are going to be fighting it out over the right to manage your connection with the rest of the known universe. Google fired the first shot with the acquisition of Nest, its smart thermostat. Apple has produced a more comprehensive strategy called HomeKit, built around a hardware and software system.

The larger strategic question is what consumers will be willing to pay to have all of this connectivity 'managed.' It is not unreasonable to assume that cable tv companies, electric utilities and anyone else touting their electronic chops is going to get into the game potentially affecting profitability for all.

The challenge, as it has been with electronic wallets, is whether anyone really wants a closer relationship with their refrigerator or wants to foster deeper understanding between their toaster, their garage door and their tablet. But before we get too skeptical, it is worth remembering that stranger things have happened. JL

Aaron Tilley reports in Forbes:

Apple made crystal clear they were going embrace being the vehicle for communication between these devices.
At Apple's developer conference this year, the secretive tech giant devoted less than a minute and half to unveiling HomeKit, its iOS-based protocol for hooking up connected gadgets in the home. But 90 seconds was all startups and hardware makers needed to begin scrambling to figure out ways to fit into Apple’s master plan for the home.
Velvetwire is one of those companies. The Santa Cruz, Calif., company makes the Powerslayer, a USB charger that tracks power in a device and turns off the charger to make sure no power is wasted. The company had been part of ZigBee, a popular wireless technology protocol for smart home devices, but as soon as the small startup first caught wind of Apple’s HomeKit, the company decided to switch over to Bluetooth low energy, the wireless technology Apple will use to connect devices together in HomeKit.
“Apple made crystal clear they were going embrace being the vehicle for communication between these devices,” Eric Bodnar, the cofounder and CEO of Velvetwire, told me. ”This was a shift in the playing field. Finally there was a dominant player.”
Many smart home companies and devices have come and gone over the past few decades, as have many wireless standards. As a result, making these devices talk to each other can be close to impossible. This is not an ideal situation for consumers or manufacturers.
But now that the industry is getting some interest outside of the gadget geeks with well-designed products like the Nest Learning Thermostat and August Smart Lock, we’re seeing more efforts directed at making it simpler for these devices to talk to each other and to standardize a format. Amid this transition, the two dominant forces in technology, Apple and Google GOOGL -2.67%, are trying to lock down their measure of influence.
Just as Apple has made clear that its vision for the connected home is in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless, Google-owned Nest has announced its own set of wireless protocols for connecting devices together in July. Called Thread, the protocol uses the same radio frequency and technology as ZigBee. Nest also opened up an API program so other devices can interact with its products.
“It looks like we’re coming to another a trench war—another VHS-Betamax war,” said Bodnar. “The Android community is going their way via Nest and Apple is going to move in another direction via HomeKit. From my perspective, the Apple solution is just a little better.”
According to Bodnar, it seems like Apple is thinking much more comprehensively about its strategy so far. Over the past few years, Apple has been embedding Bluetooth radios into all of its iPhones, laptops, tablets and Apple TV. By having Bluetooth in all these Apple products already, they could act as a bridge to these smart devices when you’re not around. So you could turn on all your connected lights through your iPhone while you’re away from home.
Apple also has an entire certification program it’s building around the HomeKit protocol, in which participants have to make hooking up their gadgets very simple for the consumer. It also forces every device in the environment to behave in certain ways so all of the devices can easily communicate to each other in apps.
“Apple is very strict–they have literally hundreds of people certifying apps,” said Maxime Veron, head of product marketing at Nest, in a phone call. “Google, on the other hand, is more about anybody who wants to play can. Nest is trying to track a good middle of the road where there are launch partners.”
And of course Nest isn’t participating in Apple’s HomeKit program. “No, we have our ‘Works With Nest’ developer program,” a Nest spokeswoman told me.
Velvetwire is planning on creating its own app in HomeKit, but Bodnar anticipates entire companies that we’ve never had before that just specialize in creating software for unified smart home experiences through the HomeKit environment.
So what’s in all this for Apple?
We have yet to see if Apple has any serious plans for creating its own smart home hardware–though there have been rumors. But even if we don’t see any Apple-made smart thermostat or door lock in the near future, it’s still a great way to sell more smartphones.
“Once you’re hooked in that far, it becomes simply another reason why everybody keeps buying an iPhone,” Bodnar speculated. “Samsung loses marketshare and more people buy the iPhone for that unified smart home experience.”
Samsung isn’t taking this battle lying down either, as evident in its acquisition last month of SmartThings, a startup that provides a hardware hub and cloud platform and works with multiple wireless standards for hundreds of connected gadgets to talk to each other.

Now that the tech giants are putting their stakes in the ground, it will be interesting to see which side the hardware makers choose.
“We always wanted to be in connected devices, but we were just waiting for big players to take a stand,” said Jennifer Lee, co-founder and COO at Velvetwire. “This is a big gamble.”