THE SMART HOME DREAM

We’ve been promised a united smart home, so why does it seem to be fracturing even more?

- ALEX COX

Peering through the mist, we’re always looking for signs of unity in the smart home world. If the fractured smart home landscape could unite itself as a compatible whole, without the need to add rickety bridges to join together its many islands, that would be a good thing. It would mean a wider choice of hardware, stronger platform understanding, widespread compatibility, and (probably) an easier point of entry. One app could, as Apple’s Home app tries to do, manage every smart device in your home — and you could choose the app you wanted to use.

Pie in the sky stuff, right? The entire history of computing is one of rival platforms battling it out; today, after 40 years of the home computer, it’s a punch–up between the Mac, the PC, Linux, multiple incompatible phone systems, and a ream of consoles. We’ve not even begun to converge on a single point. One platform does not rule them all, because playing nice isn’t in the best commercial interests of the parties involved. Just looking at Apple, because it’s the easiest example to cite, it has very sensibly placed a huge emphasis on the security of its platform. But it’s done so by (in the early days) requiring special hardware to be present in any device supporting HomeKit, and later requiring certified, licensed firmware. Whether you see this as Apple taking its pound of flesh really depends on your level of cynicism, but we’ve often cited its standoffish approach to letting folks play nice with HomeKit to be at least partly to blame for the still–slim range of fully compatible hardware.