Apple has been steadily making a push into creating smarter homes with its HomeKit platform, and for those who are wondering what the future holds for HomeKit, Apple could have clued us in as the company has apparently joined The Thread Group. This is a group dedicated to creating smart homes and Apple is now listed as a member.Of course this begs the question of what is Apple’s involvement? That remains to be seen, but The Thread has described themselves as a mesh network standard whose goal is to allow smart home devices to work together seamlessly. An example would be how at the moment a lot of smart home devices require hubs, which means that putting together a smart home with varying brands can result in a lot of redundancies.
According to the group’s description, “It’s hard to get devices to talk to one another. And once they do, the connection is often spotty and power hungry. Thread changes all that. It’s a mesh network designed to securely and reliably connect hundreds of products around the home – without blowing through battery life.”
However like we said, what exactly will become of Apple joining this group remains to be seen, but their involvement does indicate their plans to grow HomeKit. Last year Apple was spotted joining the WPC which resulted in iPhones with wireless charging support, so hopefully we won’t have to wait too long to see the results from this.
Filed in . Read more about Connected Objects, HomeKit and IoT (Internet of Things).