What’s the Future of Smart Home Technology?
As I’m writing this post in December 2021, smart home technology has come a long way.
The major tech companies are dominating the space with proprietary ecosystems that challenge consumers to make tough choices that could exclude their competitors.
When Apple released Siri back in 2011, it was arguably the world’s first popular smart assistant and really didn’t have any competition at all.
Other companies soon followed suit and in some ways even caught up.
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Smart Assistants: Apple vs. Amazon vs. Google
While Apple promised consumers to provide a great product, it also touted an emphasis on privacy protections and security. There seems to be a consensus that this decision held back the pace of progress it could make.
Amazon released its smart assistant Alexa in 2014 and by many accounts it’s now often perceived to be the most advanced, at least when it comes to its ability to understand spoken commands and questions fluidly.
Google came out with Google Assistant in 2016, which is five years after Apple, and yet it too seems to be further along now than Siri.
Smart Home Platforms: Apple vs. Amazon vs. Google
Not surprisingly, the same dynamic appears to have played out in their respective smart home platforms.
Once again, Apple took a rather cautious approach and as a result it apparently gave up its first mover advantage and fell behind in terms of adoption.
Apple’s smart home platform is known as HomeKit. Initially, it was known to have very strict security requirements, some would argue onerous, as it even touched on hardware requirements.
Instead of releasing its own smart home products, Apple relied on other companies filling this need. The market opportunity was said to give them enough of an incentive to make changes to their hardware and undergo the rigorous HomeKit application process.
Needless to say, this limited the number of companies who chose to make HomeKit-compatible devices. To the extent that it raised their costs and also limited competition by excluding alternatives, it did not come as a surprise then that HomeKit-compatible devices always tended to be more pricey and still do cost more.
Amazon and Google, on the other hand, took a decisively different approach. They both opened up their smart assistants and smart home platforms to software integration with other companies. Amazon enjoyed a bit of a first-mover advantage in that regard with the rapid success of its voice-enabled smart assistant Alexa.
As time went by, Apple leadership seemingly realized the position they were in and in 2017 they finally took action to make it easier for other companies to participate in and develop devices that would be compatible with the HomeKit platform. They did this by dropping the hardware requirement and allowing software integration. That being said, the focus on security did not go away and many third-party developers continued to claim the integration process was more time-consuming with Apple.
To this day, Amazon and Google are still ahead of Apple in adoption stats. HomeKit users have long had a smaller selection of available smart home devices and in many cases HomeKit-compatible devices are not necessarily the market leader for a given type of product.
For a long time, it was impossible to find wireless security cameras that worked with HomeKit. Even smart doorbells lagged behind for some time. To this day, it’s not clear if there is a robot vacuum that would work with HomeKit. Then there are compromises consumers had to make. Google Nest smoke detectors, for instance, would not work with HomeKit either. Often times, smart home devices that are compatible with HomeKit will also work with Google or Amazon Alexa. The converse cannot be said of the majority of devices that work with Google or Amazon Alexa. Seemingly, more often than not, they won’t work with HomeKit.
Amazon and Google also haven’t been shy about releasing smart home devices themselves. Both of them even acquired companies that were already in this field, such as Ring in the case of Amazon and Nest in the case of Google. Apple, on the other hand, aside from a few products such as its HomePod has relied much more on third parties to develop and manufacture smart home devices for its platform. Maybe Apple just doesn’t see a lot of profit potential in focusing its time and effort on manufacturing smart home devices directly, but if it did, there’s a good chance it would be able to speed up adoption given its long track history in releasing quality products.
Other Smart Home Tech Providers
If it weren’t for the fact that there is still a lot of potential and lots of money to be spent by consumers, the picture would look rather bleak for many of the other companies who are in the smart home game.
Some of these companies are not only making smart home devices to be compatible with HomeKit, Alexa or Google Home, they also have their own smart assistants (such as Samsung Bixby) or increasingly they are trying to set up their own ecosystems with a growing suite of smart home devices (such as Ecobee).
It remains to be seen whether they can keep up a formidable competition in the long term, especially if Google, Amazon and even Apple start to manufacture more smart home devices themselves.
Matter and Interoperability
For consumers who are looking to have more choice in the matter and less to worry about when shopping for smart home devices, there seems to be a promising beacon shining light in the distance. Ironically, this new standard that we are talking about is also called Matter.
Smart home devices with Matter support will be able to cross-operate more easily. It’s not clear what the incentives are for big companies to support Matter but widespread consumer dissatisfaction and regulatory pressure could be one poignant reason.
The launch of the Matter software development kit has been delayed multiple times, most recently until summer 2022. Its future impact remains to be seen.
