The companies that rule mobile are taking over the smart home, too

GOOGLE AND AMAZON ARE IN THE PICTURE, TOO

Apple and Samsung are making pushes into the smart home for obvious reasons: the smart home — and, more broadly, the Internet of Things — is a huge business opportunity, especially if they're at the center of it. And neither has to worry about immediately profiting off of their work, since there are bigger stakes in the long run: Apple can further entrench the iPhone in people's lives; and eventually, Samsung intends to offer paid services through SmartThings — it's already starting to do this with security monitoring.

Apple and Samsung may be the first of our current tech giants to try this approach, but they aren't the only ones. Google is working on a smart home language called Weave, which should eventually do for Android what HomeKit is doing for iOS. And Amazon is quietly building up its own smart home ecosystem using its voice assistant Alexa, which has been learning to talk to more and more products (and making its way inside of other companies' products, too).

That may sound like a new version of our current mess — too much going on in the smart home for any of it to make sense — but it's easy to see the issue being mitigated if two or three platforms become dominant. Just like most app developers support both iOS and Android, it wouldn't be a surprise if all companies in the smart home market supported both HomeKit and SmartThings, or SmartThings and Weave, or Weave and Alexa. That would also mean leaving consumers with options should one company make some disagreeable changes.

The nice thing about all of these companies taking on the smart home is that they can make it very easy for us. And, because they're so huge, they can get a rich ecosystem of companies to line up and listen, making compatible products that integrate with each other. But it's worth questioning whether, in the long run, it's ideal for the companies already ruling over mobile — and much more — to control yet another facet of our lives. That's already starting to happen. And if they continue to make building a smart home easy enough for everyone, it likely will.

Continue Reading