How is Apple Smart Home Products doing in the market? now, smart home products are everywhere, companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple are competing to offer new products. Amazon and Google kept their place leading the home automation market, especially after Apple introduced HomeKit in 2014, it became clear that the former two are keeping their place.
However, it seems like the market is changing, and we may witness Apple rushing to the top soon.
As recent reports show that the star of Cupertino is trying to recruit new engineers in its team, to catch up in the home automation race.
In addition, the company is recruiting new members industry-wide. While doing so they enrolled talented members who have been working for Qualcomm Inc and Amazon.
It seems that the company will focus on the hardware, as they are searching for expertise in developing battery-powered wireless devices with camera modules.
Related Post: 6 Reasons Why to buy an Apple Homepod
Apple’s Role in Smart Home Products market nowadays
Apple’s HomePod seizes 5% of US voice-controlled – smart speaker market share, where Amazon and Google market share in US smart speaker sales are 70% & 20% respectively.
The two companies are also offering smart displays to operate as smart speakers but with a screen so the user can watch videos or make video calls. The area where Apple stands behind.
Amazon is pushing Echo devices through its marketing channel and Prime membership, which explain the high market share.
On the other hand, HomePod is a weak competition; as it’s expensive, highly reliant on Apple services, and operates with a much smaller number of connected smart devices, although it’s considered a good speaker.
However, till now we are not sure about the future of smart speakers, so it may be early to judge the situation.
If we compare the compatibility with third-party devices of Apple’s HomeKit vs Alexa from Amazon and Google’s smart home platform, Apple will be at the bottom of the line with only 450 third-party compatible devices, vs compatibility with 85,000 smart devices from almost 10,000 manufacturers and over 10,000 devices from +1000 major brands for Alexa and Google respectively.
Silk Labs
Silk Laps was founded by Andreas Gal, Former Mozilla CTO. The San Francisco start-up worked on developing an AI-based platform capable of linking together IoT devices.
Apple acquisition of Silk Labs in 2018 suggested that the company is still trying the smart home devices. Some think that Apple is aiming to offer something different than the products already in the market, especially with the saturation of the smartphone market.
The Ai platform that Silk Laps is developing is relevant to Apples’ suggested new direction, as:
- Its assistant can modify its behavior according to appearance and sound when it gets accustomed to the user
- The assistant is designed to work on-device, puts one’s mind to rest in terms of privacy, which increased in importance recently with the increasing data breaches.
We don’t know yet how the company will develop and roll out an AI platform across different sections. Yet Apple always surprises us with its offerings. So, let’s wait and see.
