Thanks to Home Connectivity Standards Alliance, smart appliances from multiple brands will be talking to each other. The alliance is a consortium of more than a dozen appliance manufacturers, including Samsung, Trane, Electrolux, LG and Resideo. This new standard aims to ensure large smart appliances from different brands work in tandem to deliver convenience to consumers and to achieve energy saving goals.
The standard is designed to ensure costly and large smart home appliances (kitchen, laundry, and HVAC systems, for example) work together so consumers only need one app for everything. The alliance’s operating principal is “any app to any device” and initially “focuses on the 25 percent of features than 80 percent of people use,” according to HCA president and board chairman Yoon Ho Choi.
These classes of appliance manufactures are very expensive and can last for many years so the organization designed its standard so that legacy smart appliances can be upgraded to the standard via firmware updates. Consumers won’t need to worry about replacing products they might have purchased.
The HCA’s plan is designed to complement rather than compete with the Matter standard. Matter connects compatible devices and systems with one another making them secure, reliable and seamless to use. HCA’s focus is on cloud-to-cloud communications.
