Due to lack of an industry-wide connectivity standard, most of the smart home devices you buy will not be compatible with each other. To improve this situation, Google, Amazon and Apple are now working with several others in the tech industry on a new smart home standard called Connected Home over IP. The new Connected Home over IP is an independent working group managed by the Zigbee Alliance. This new standard is different from the existing Zigbee 3.0/Pro protocol.

The goal of this new standard is to bring together market-tested technologies to develop a new, open smart home connectivity standard based on Internet Protocol (IP).

As part of this alliance, Google is contributing two of its smart home technologies, Weave and Thread. Weave is an application protocol that works over many networks like Thread, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, and cellular.

Apart from consumers, developers will also benefit from this new standard as they can develop products for one standard instead of rewriting the same for different ecosystems.

Smart home devices built on this new standard will be compatible with Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and others.

Source: Google