This week at CES, Samsung, Haier (and its subsidiary GE Appliances), Electrolux, and others announced the formation of the Home Connectivity Alliance, a group focused on fostering cloud-to-cloud interoperability across different home appliances.
The organization, which was incorporated in September 2021, is focused on solving a big problem for the smart home: incompatibility across different brands’ smart appliance products. Anyone with smart home appliances from different brands knows why this is a problem. Connected appliance product lines typically have their own proprietary app that only works with that brand. The end result is multiple apps and products that don’t talk to each other.
Here’s how the group’s website describes the benefits of interoperability: A consumer may purchase a connected washer and dryer from Brand A and benefit from features like notifications that alert the user when their wash or dry cycle is complete. Unfortunately, these notifications can only be enabled via Brand A’s platform. Interoperability enables consumers to purchase a washer from Brand A and a dryer from Brand B (or vice versa) and still receive the convenient wash or dry cycle completion notification either from Brand A’s platform or Brand B’s platform.
To achieve that type of cross-brand interoperability, the HCA’s focus is on making sure member companies’ data and service clouds connect. This focus on cloud-to-cloud interop makes sense in 2022, a time well into the smart home revolution where interoperability in the lower parts of the network stack – like physical layer communications (i.e. Wi-Fi, Zigbee, etc) – has largely been solved.
Since the HCA was founded only three months ago, it’s not surprising there are no technical details on how it will work (and by no details, I mean no details: The technical info page simply says “more info to come!”). One of the big unknowns will be how the group will work with other efforts to create cross-compatibility in the smart home, including the much-discussed Matter standard founded by Amazon, Apple and, yes, Samsung’s SmartThings Group.
In Samsung’s announcement about the group, they make no mention of Matter or other smart home interoperability standards (though they mention their own platform SmartThings), instead talking up the importance of interoperability across appliance brands.
“It is the support of global manufacturers like Samsung that makes HCA uniquely qualified to establish interoperability guidelines for long-life appliances and systems in the home, ultimately delivering safe, simple and elegant consumer experiences,” said Yoon Ho Choi, President of Home Connectivity Alliance (and Samsung employee).
While the group has an impressive initial roster of members, a few notable absences include BSH Appliances, Whirlpool, and LG Electronics. BSH is particularly interesting because the group has its own smart home interoperability standard it has been pushing for some time called Home Connect.
In many ways, it’s this absence of other big names that is the HCA’s (and really any interoperability effort’s) biggest challenge; any semblance of full cross-brand compatibility is, by definition, out of reach unless all of the industry’s biggest stakeholders buy in. Whether or not that happens for HCA is yet to be determined, but it’s still early days and the group is off to a good start. Let’s hope they can make it happen so we smart appliance owners can finally have products that reach their full potential.
