<story><title>HomeKit</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/homekit/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zmmmmm</author><text>Dear Apple, please for the love of god and the good of everyone, get together with Google and iron out a common protocol for this stuff. Don&amp;#x27;t make this one of your competitive technologies designed to fragment the world into Apple and not-Apple. Home automation is just dying to take off and there&amp;#x27;s a pile of gold for everyone if you just show a tiny bit of cooperation to get it started ... And you can all still sue each other afterwards if you like about the design of the light switches or whatever turns you on, but can we please just let the industry move forward first?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>windexh8er</author><text>But...&lt;p&gt;They won&amp;#x27;t.  Please, if you&amp;#x27;re developing on iOS don&amp;#x27;t do this.  Apple is hungry and looking for another market segment to lock out the slow, but good, innovation taking place.  Today I happily control 70% of my house with full access to scene programming and enjoy no vendor lock-in other than the protocols my choice of controller supports.  The biggest things here is I have access to a local API, I don&amp;#x27;t need to rely on Internet connectivity - something most everyone gets wrong.&lt;p&gt;Home automation is huge.  Apple mindlessly taking it down to simplistic &amp;quot;Xfinity home automation levels&amp;quot; but making it pretty doesn&amp;#x27;t help.&lt;p&gt;SmartThings, WigWag, Revolv - all suck.  They lock the smart home user out by not exposing an API.  Why?  They want to collect sit in the middle and collect data.  None of these companies seem to get that there&amp;#x27;s a middle ground and the initial users are not all ones that trust a start-up 1) with their data and 2) to be around next year.  There&amp;#x27;s only a few that get it right and they&amp;#x27;re not the prettiest by far or they&amp;#x27;d, likely, rule the landscape.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been running home automation for over 3 years now on the same platform - nothing today is anything new or different.  If I want my phone to be a piece of my HA system I&amp;#x27;ll use applications specific that help me make those tie-ins, but I don&amp;#x27;t want Google, Apple or some other fly-by-night-startup to get in the middle of that.  It&amp;#x27;s my home, that&amp;#x27;s personal.</text></comment>
<story><title>HomeKit</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/homekit/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zmmmmm</author><text>Dear Apple, please for the love of god and the good of everyone, get together with Google and iron out a common protocol for this stuff. Don&amp;#x27;t make this one of your competitive technologies designed to fragment the world into Apple and not-Apple. Home automation is just dying to take off and there&amp;#x27;s a pile of gold for everyone if you just show a tiny bit of cooperation to get it started ... And you can all still sue each other afterwards if you like about the design of the light switches or whatever turns you on, but can we please just let the industry move forward first?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krschultz</author><text>I absolutely doubt that Apple will. Look at AirPlay. Look at AirDrop. Look at iMessage and Facetime. Even their original content formats were not all that portable.&lt;p&gt;Some of those are for technical&amp;#x2F;licensing reasons, but many are not.</text></comment>