The smart home dream

Peering through the mists, we’re always soothsaying for signs of unity in the smart home world. If the fractured smart home landscape could unite itself as a compatible whole, without the need to add rickety bridges to join its many islands together, that would be a good thing. It would mean a wider choice of hardware, stronger platform understanding, widespread compatibility, and (probably) an easier point of entry. One app could, as Apple’s Home app tries to do, manage every smart device in your home – and you could take your pick of the app you wanted to use.

Pie in the sky stuff, right? The entire history of computing is one of rival platforms battling it out; today, after 40 years of the home computer, it’s a punch-up between the Mac, the PC, Linux, multiple incompatible phone systems and a ream of consoles. We have not even begun to converge on a single point. One platform does not rule them all, because playing nice isn’t in the best commercial interests of the parties involved. Just looking at Apple, because it’s the easiest example to cite, it has very sensibly placed a huge