Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance to develop open standard for smart home devices

Apple:

Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet.

This has huge potential. It will be interesting to see if Amazon opens up their Ring doorbell protocol. All the Ring doorbell hacking stories, true or not, are hurting their brand, and likely hurting the overall product category trustability.

Would love to see a path where Apple forces stronger privacy/security, rather than a weaker standard that allows all entrants to play.

Here’s the link to the main alliance page. Note that Apple’s name (all the way at the bottom) is plain text, no logo. Odd.