According to a new report by Bloomberg, Apple is investing heavily in its smart home division in an attempt to grow the company’s presence in the smart home market.
Today’s report from Bloomberg suggests there is a much bigger company initiative to try and get Apple to capture a bigger portion of the smart home market.
The new effort is reportedly headed by Andreas Gal, who Apple hired as part of an acquisition of Silk Labs in late 2018. Apple is looking to engineer solutions that make it easier for third-party smart home accessory manufacturers to adopt HomeKit.
Bloomberg also says that the group is also exploring whether Apple should produce smart home accessories of its own, like lights or door locks. It has been previously reported that Apple is working on a companion to the HomePod for 2020, a smaller voice assistant speaker with a lower starting price.
One potential area of interest for Apple’s hardware teams is home security cameras, which could synergize with the forthcoming iOS 13 feature called HomeKit Secure Recording. This will let HomeKit cameras automatically upload clips to a user’s iCloud account, in an end-to-end encrypted fashion. Bloomberg says that a few years ago, Apple was looking at making a ‘wide range’ of home accessories but the development was shelved.
Apple has made it easier for companies to make HomeKit accessories in the last year or so by transitioning from a hardware authentication module to a purely software-based system. However, some manufacturers continue to complain that adding HomeKit is costly and that the Apple certification process is slow.
