Apple HomeKit How to affect the national intelligent hardware pattern

• Apple HomeKit How to affect the national intelligent hardware pattern
• 2014-06-23 15:48 Published system categories: Consumer Electronics Custom Classification: Default
• Tags: smart home

Apple unveiled a series of heavyweight development frameworks, including home Kit,health Kit,cloud Kit, at the WWDC developer conference in June. Among them, the release of HomeKit to the current hot domestic and foreign smart home market has an important impact. Speaking at the developer conference, the home kit is short (less than 2 minutes), giving the outside world only a very superficial concept. Therefore, the domestic and foreign media in the reporting depth limited to the Apple in the smart home to start layout. As to how this framework is specifically positioned, how manufacturers and entrepreneurs should respond to problems that are of concern to us all lack answers.

The savvy Cloud team's view of HomeKit and media coverage has a different perspective. As an authorized developer of Apple's long-term MFI (made for Iphone/ipad/ipod peripheral program), we have close relationships with the first announced home kit partners (including Haier, broadcom,marvell,ti, etc.). We began to study the wireless device configuration technology associated with it (Wireless accessory, WAC) before the home kit was released. To help our many partners achieve docking with home kit, we have done a detailed analysis of this framework. Here I can share with you our understanding of HomeKit and its impact on the industry.

What the hell is HomeKit?

Let's listen to what Apple officially describes HomeKit:

Home Kit provides seamless integration between accessories that support Apple's Home Automation Protocol and IOS devices, Allowing for new advances in home automation.

Simply put, HomeKit to break the current various intelligent hardware manufacturers fragmented, user experience uneven chaotic market pattern, so that the smart home equipment manufacturers can be interactive at the iOS level, without these manufacturers directly docking. After careful study of this architecture, we found that home kit is a set of protocols, is a database on iOS, but also the smart home product interconnection of new thinking mode. Apple has left a lot of room for development for smart hardware developers and third-party developers.

First of all, talk about communication protocols. HomeKit regulates how smart home products connect and communicate with iOS terminals. Craig Federighi, senior vice president of Apple Software, said in WWDC keynote that the binding feature of the Home kit Protocol (secure pairing) ensured that only your iphone could open your garage door. Of course, the hardware and software communication protocol is very learning. Among the announced Chip partners are Broadcom, Marvell and Ti, which are the mainstream providers of implantable Wi-Fi chips, so you can confirm that the pre-HomeKit primarily supports Wi-Fi or direct-attached Ethernet devices. At present, there are many difficulties to overcome in the development of Wi-Fi intelligent hardware, including how to pair the device with the phone, how to get Wi-Fi password and join the home hotspot, how to ensure stable and secure remote connection and so on.

At the database level, Apple has launched an industry-friendly infrastructure: A smart home database that can be queried and edited by third-party apps on iOS. This database contains several very important concepts that are useful for today's smart hardware developers: home, room, area, device, service, action, triggering.

HomeKit the family as a collection of smart home devices that combine these devices organically through homes, rooms, and areas. The two concepts of equipment and services are interesting. Here Apple introduces a relatively unfamiliar hardware industry, but rather "internet" concept: Service-oriented design (oriented Architecture). A hardware device is defined as a unit that provides one or more services that can be discovered and invoked by third-party applications. Philips ' hue LEDs, for example, can be understood to provide lighting services, where switch control, color and brightness control are the specific functions of this service. Similarly, Haier's Tianzun air conditioning can be understood as a device providing refrigeration, heating, air purification and other services related to air quality.

All the smart devices in the family that support the HomeKit standard release the supported services and are included in a unified database via the iOS discovery mechanism. Above the basic units of equipment and services, HomeKit defines a scene unit, such as home, room, area (combination of multiple rooms), to allow multiple units of the home to form an organic combination. For example, appliances in the bedroom (such as lights and curtains) can be organized into a single scene for unified control. Zones can combine equipment from multiple rooms to control them together.

What else can homekit do besides remote control?

Speaking of control, HomeKit's design is far from what some media have explained, simply turning the iphone into a universal remote controller. There are two important automation concepts in the control system of Home Kit: Trigger (Trigger) and operation (action). This is very similar to the foreign IFTTT application, the user can use simple "IF X then Y" formula and a lot of out-of-the-box data interface to achieve a very diversified automatic alert and operation function. Similarly, the triggering and manipulation mechanisms of the home kit can be used to automate a variety of scenarios: for example, "when the bedroom lights are turned on, pull the curtains".

Of course, with Apple's style of doing things, they use HomeKit as a development framework and will not be able to participate in the definition and implementation of these specific scenarios. It's like having a game-developing infrastructure on iOS, but Apple doesn't play games, HomeKit Open data interfaces to developers, enabling them to innovate in smart homes. One of the selling points of Home kit is Siri's integration. The user can enter control commands via voice. This is actually a facility for developers, because the instructions themselves are defined by the developer.

Through the analysis of the HomeKit architecture and the first group of partners, we can think that Apple in the smart home is actually building a factory + developers to serve the user's ecological environment. Through an open design philosophy, Apple has set aside considerable space for partners, while also refining their division of labor. Hardware manufacturers ' expertise in providing good products while building a good user experience on a mobile phone is the forte of developers, especially third-party developers. And the Apple itself continues to be a platform for positioning. In the public to promote the development of smart home industry environment, in the private consolidation of iOS devices in the family's core position.

HomeKit, what's missing from this jigsaw puzzle?

But we can also see HomeKit this smart hardware +ios+apps/siri smart Home portfolio is obviously incomplete. When the user is holding an iOS device at home, the phone can temporarily become the central nervous system of the smart home, but the high mobility of iOS as the part-time CNS is clearly inappropriate or inadequate: when the user leaves home, the original perfect smart home is immediately beaten back to the Stone Age.

Here Apple leaves a vacancy: The hub that coordinates smart hardware outside of iOS. There are two possibilities: one is a hardware-biased approach-Apple can put its own Apple Tv,airport router, as well as the future ITV, as the persistent smart home hub. Another possibility of biased software is that this responsibility is placed in ICloud.

Most crucially, what opportunities does HomeKit provide to the domestic startup team and hardware manufacturers?

Finally, I will analyze the current situation of the smart home market and the opportunities HomeKit brings. At present, the market strategy of smart home products are mainly 4 kinds:

The first kind is like Haier uhome or the United States Control4 such as the whole intelligent home system, through the physical wiring or ZigBee and other wireless communication methods to connect compatible lighting, audio and video, security electronic equipment connected to a central control system to achieve unified control. This holistic approach is complete, with a unified user experience, but requires professional installation and is expensive. Domestic manufacturers generally choose to cooperate with real estate developers, the main front-loading market, but the popularity rate is relatively slow.

The second type is the international first-line home appliance Enterprises to develop a set of software protocols first to connect their own products to become a platform, and then through the opening of the agreement to let other manufacturers of products to join its ecosystem. Samsung's smart home and Haier's u+ smart home operating system are the concept. Samsung is from a strong TV and mobile phone, Haier is the leading edge of white goods admission.

The third category is the router/gateway approach, replacing the router as a universal product to reduce the threshold of entry into the family, occupy the family's data portal, and then gradually integrate other products. There are a lot of players in the smart routers on the market recently. Millet is a high-profile use of Xiaomi Smart home model to show the integration of millet router capabilities.

These three types of walk are platform thinking, high threshold and long cycle. Most entrepreneurial teams and manufacturers choose the fourth strategy: the single-function products to the extreme, a single point of breakthrough into the family, and then gradually expand the product line, try to integrate other products. Nest (pre-Google acquisition), Dropcam,belkin Wemo,smartthings,hue, ink weather, magic Intelligence, Bo Lian, and most of the home appliance companies and smart hardware creators are walking this product direction.

It is clear that HomeKit's positioning is more friendly to the fourth category of players, while the top three players will be hit harder in the future.

Apple wants a more open model to lure these hardware manufacturers into their docking. In addition to providing comprehensive protocols, a universal database and a large iOS user base, third-party developers have been introduced to make them available to manufacturers, providing software support for applications in different scenarios.

As a result, players with the ability and ambition to operate the top three platform models are a bit awkward. Companies that do not compete directly with Apple on hardware products can be as compatible as Apple HomeKit. And Samsung, Xiaomi these positioning and the development of Apple-like platform will inevitably make the market to form a number of intelligent home platform with the scale of the existence of the fragmented situation, to the hope that these platforms are compatible with the hardware manufacturers to bring very high research and development and maintenance costs.

Helping these hardware manufacturers overcome the compatibility issues between these smart home platforms also presents new opportunities for IoT technology and cloud service providers. Wit cloud, and like arrayent and Ayla networks these are similar to our location of the IoT service platform in the provision of comprehensive hardware cloud support services, can be provided by the hardware products cross-platform access capabilities and more intelligent home manufacturers accepted.

Overall, the launch of Apple HomeKit is a boon for the development of the entire smart home industry. When launched in October, IOS 8 will significantly increase consumer focus on related smart hardware. In the mobile phone operating system to build a reasonable structure, left out to the various players the opportunity is quite huge. Google's upcoming Google IO Developers Conference will certainly have a corresponding action, so that the smart home market heat continues to heat up. Show time!

Apple HomeKit How to affect the national intelligent hardware pattern