Apple Wants to Be the Remote Control for Your House

By Yourwellness Last updated Jun 2, 2014 13

In the following video, tech analyst Eric Bleeker and Max Macaluso discuss Apple‘s (NASDAQ: AAPL ) plans to enter the smart home space.

The smart home space has been expanding rapidly in recent years. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG ) made a major push when it acquired Nest for over $3 billion, and reports have it eyeing Dropbox, a company that makes connected video cameras. Now, reports from The Financial Times have Apple announcing its own software for managing the digital home at this week’s WWDC conference in San Francisco.

One of the major problems with the space is fragmentation. At a recent home automation conference, Eric was able to discuss the space with the CEO of Revolv, a company that creates a device and app that aggregates connected home products into a single app.

To accomplish this, the company has created a device with seven different radios to handle all the different wireless standards — WiFi, ZigBee, Z-Wave, etc. — that different connected home products use. Also, there’s no “HTML” for home devices, meaning the process of supporting different devices is difficult.

The opportunity is massive, however. Revolv says their average customer has 12 different devices connected to their product. With the industry being tremendously un-user-friendly, it’s easy to understand why Apple wants to try simplifying it.