The ‘Internet of Things’ Needs a Fix
Lack of standards, lack of security, and application creep all create inertia against easy adoption.
The first moments of ownership usually involve downloading an app, creating an account and connecting the thing to your Wi-Fi network. Sometimes that all goes well. Sometimes there goes your Saturday afternoon.
Then you’ve got the Tower of Things Babel to contend with: The apps don’t talk to one another. You must open one app to adjust the lighting, another to change your speakers’ volume, a third to tweak the temperature.
The industry knows about these problems. They’re frantically developing standards to unify all this stuff. Trouble is, each big company has developed its own standard. There’s Thread (from Google), HomeKit (Apple), AllJoyn (originally Qualcomm) and SmartThings (Samsung), among others.
That’s right: the very act of trying to settle the standards war has resulted in … a new standards war.
More: The ‘Internet of Things’ Needs a Fix - Scientific American