Apple’s WWDC Return to Smart Home Reflects Industry Shifting to Automation

Apple’s 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) brought the company’s smart home play back to the fore. While there was no new smart home-specific hardware—despite the lackluster appeal of the singular HomePod device—time was given to new smart home features due in the Fall release of iOS 14. The company’s commitment to the smart home Connected Home over IP (CHiP) Project and a push toward automated capabilities within the Apple Homekit smart home platform and ecosystem was also highlighted. Together, these announcements highlighted a shift in the direction of the smart home market

As Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi and his colleagues went through the list of changes that iOS 14 will bring to Apple users, ChiP, HomeKit, and the Home app were all highlighted.

Apple emphasized its role in the CHiP project and how the project will draw more players, devices, and end users into the HomeKit ecosystem and the wider smart home market. Apple highlighted its work to smooth the integration of new devices into its Home app and HomeKit platform, but iOS 14 isn’t just aimed at simplifying onboarding. As devices are added, there will also be suggested automation routines to maximize the value of each device by smoothing operational integration. For example, when a new light is detected, iOS 14 will suggest routine integrations that enable the light to be switched on by motion detection or switched off when the home is empty. Furthering lighting automation, new Adaptive Lighting capabilities offer a degree of biophilia support with functionality to hand over lighting controls to HomeKit so that lighting properties, such as color or brightness, are adjusted according to the time of day.

Apple also highlighted greater integration of smart home support across its devices. Video from HomeKit-supporting cameras can be shown full screen or as Picture-in-Picture (PiP) on TV screens connected to Apple TVs running iOS 14. In addition, access to contacts in iOS 14 control devices means that camera facial recognition can tie contact profiles to enable HomePods or Apple TV devices to announce individuals at the door when detected by a video camera or smart doorbell.

The HomeKit framework will also support assigned activity zones so that the most important areas in a camera’s field of view can be set to trigger an action, like turning on a light and/or sending a notification, while activities beyond that zone will not trigger an action, even though they are within view of the camera.

While the iOS 14 smart home features were incremental improvements to Apple’s smart home offerings, often catching up with functionality already available from competitors in the case of active zones, for example, it is the shift to emphasizing automation that best speaks to the wider direction for the entire smart home market.

Smart home platform players are increasingly focused on greater device compatibility and more reliable control of their smart home ecosystems to ensure that greater adoption leads to greater automation and value. With greater automation comes greater end user appeal and, for smart home players, greater value in their smart home and smart home-related service offerings. The highlighted CHiP project is a key part of enabling that greater automation.

As evidenced by the 2018 ABI Insight Smart Plug Update Leads the Way for Wide Apple Smart Home Support (IN-5218), Apple has long demanded far tighter certification for devices qualified to work within the HomeKit framework than for its key rivals. HomeKit also supports greater end user anonymity within its services. For example, at WWDC Apple again highlighted the long-standing anonymizing of Siri interactions between the device application and the cloud, but more direct smart home privacy was also to the fore. As part of Apple’s secure video feature, all processing, such as face recognition, is handled locally on the devices in the home instead of via the cloud. In addition, there is encryption on data passed between devices.

While Apple’s control of its ecosystem and management of customer data has traditionally set it apart, increasingly, aspects of the company’s approach are being adopted by other players—not yet to the degree of customer privacy, especially given the appeal and value of customer data to the largest smart home players, but in ensuring tighter centralized control over device integration and support within an ecosystem.

Over the past year, Google looked to exert greater control over its smart home ecosystem by replacing Works with Nest with the more closely controlled Works with Google Assistant program. The ABI Insight The Implications of Google Ending “Works with Nest” (IN-5557) explains how some third-party integrations were left behind. Similarly, in December 2019, Samsung announced its SmartThings smart home platform would end support for the Groovy programming language and the SmartThings Integrated Development Environment (IDE), that had long enabled third parties to develop Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that could support integrations and automations for their devices with the SmartThings platform. Most recently, in May 2020, Chinese smart home and Internet of Things (IoT) player Tuya announced its platform would no longer support integration with the If This Then That (IFTTT) platform, which also enabled end users and third parties to build automations using the Tuya SmartLife platform and its supported devices.

Google and Samsung are both founding members of the CHiP project. Tuya, for its part, announced it had joined the CHiP effort as well as having become a board member of the ZigBee Alliance within weeks of announcing it was ending IFTTT integration.

Inspired by CHiP and the market direction that initiated the CHiP project, smart home platform providers are looking to ensure their platform can deliver secure, reliable smart home systems as the bedrock for a wave of greater automation capability, platform value, and appeal. This strategy is increasingly replacing the earlier wild west style dash from smart home platform players to support as many devices and integrations as possible in order to capture a large share of the market’s rapidly growing installed base. Apple hadn’t embraced that strategy and the market is swinging back to favor a more Apple-like approach.

With CHiP promising to make one device Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) applicable for integration into all CHiP partner platforms (rather than, as now, each platform demanding its own integration certification and often different product designs for each platform), increasingly, it will be the reliability, security, and interoperability of smart home devices to deliver intuitive, “invisible” smart home control that will draw smart home users and keep them using to a particular platform. Likewise, global consumer companies will be wary of engaging and integrating with partners that cannot deliver the platforms that best deliver a positive and seamless experience for end users subscribed to services through their smart home systems. Apple’s WWDC announcements may have been incremental, but they provided an additional marker for the direction of the next generation of smart home offerings.