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Comment by polskibus | Hacker News Reader

There should be regulation that forces all vendors to use a public standars, instead of letting them develop their own. Home automation would clearly benefit from a single specification and multiple implementations, instead of current multiple implementation scenario. Web has grown thanks to html being a common ground. HA is wonderful considering how many walled gardens there are .

Imagine buying a house and having to rip out the automation because it's implementation does not work with whatever you have to use.

Home automation should be seen as utility, just like electricity. I really don't care if apple or google doesn't see it that way. Electricity has standardized on something , so home automation can too.

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You might be interested in https://www.connectedhomeip.com/, which is a "Working Group [that] plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet."

> There should be regulation that forces all vendors to use a public standars, instead of letting them develop their own.

Forcing them to use public standards and forbid them to develop their own? You can't possibly believe that, you're literally stifling innovation. A much better approach would be to force them to make their standards public.

Or even better, make them support open standards that cover the basics but let them play with their own "advanced" custom features.

The proper place to do this is in building codes: forbid hardwiring of devices at build time that don't (at minimum) support a basic, local protocol and be cloud-disable-able.

They can do whatever they want in addition to that, but table stakes or you aren't installable in a new build home.

But how do you prevent it from turning into another AMD FreeSync issue? FreeSync is a royalty-free, free to use display syncing technology.

However many monitors only implement part of the overall FreeSync spec. So when you buy a monitor with FreeSync, it might be fine from 1-60 fps, but 61-144 fps might have issues.

So, how do you enforce that all "basics" are met? Consider the complexity of new technologies like Bluetooth 5 or Wifi 6 - even getting all the basics is a huge amount of work.

Mandatory tech standards enforced by regulation are likely to be crap and out of date, thats the problem. Also, big corps will capture the regulation process and force their version to be standard, and so on. Better to let something emerge from the chaos, probably will in a few years time. In the meantime, no real damage is being done, its not like people are dying due to the lack of an HA standard.

It works fairly well in the EU and non "IT" areas, where introduction of an ISO standard is required to gain wider market access and consumer approval. It could be sufficient to point out that there are X organizations that created accepted standards, any device needs to implement a standard from at least 2 orgs. A standard would specify transport (HTTPS), schema and meaning for all messages, authentication and authorization protocol. Most importantly, there should be a standardized way to poll devices for data.

Like the internet. It'll never work.

I think your comment presupposes that the solution that the state would dictate would be better or, at least, more useful than the alternatives. That's likely incorrect.

Electricity standardized largely without government intervention, and it worked out mostly okay.

As another commenter pointed out, no harm is being done during this short period where the standards shake out, and most people still use plain ol' mechanical light switches.

Please don't be so quick to reach for the regulation hammer. It's not the solution you seem to think it is.

It was to manufacturer's advantage for electricity to be standardized. Otherwise they would have to support components for every single distributor. I don't know if it was to distributor's advantage... I think there's probably some argument for a shared grid and lines improving them also.

There's no advantage I can think of for Philips to host non-Philips protocols on their lightbulbs.

>There should be regulation that forces all vendors to use a public standars

and we'll end up with something like TR-069

no, thanks.

A lot of them use UPnP but there are almost no apps that can deal with the IoT features of the protocol so most manufactures write their own UPnP app with a bunch of "features" demanded by business people.

Hopefully standards will coalesce over time, but right now I feel like the industry still needs to experiment to find the best interfaces to address power usage, security, and features.

The S in IoT stands for security :-)

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