Smart Home – Back to front.

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Apple is losing badly despite offering the best user experience.

• Apple has redesigned its HomeKit website (see here) in order to generate interest around its smart home offering but despite having the best experience, it remains a very distant third in developed markets.
• HomeKit enables smart home devices to be controlled with Siri as well as the Apple’s own Home app that appeared with iOS10.
• I think that Apple has three main problems with its offering for smart home:
  • First: Hardware. device makers need to install a piece of Apple hardware to enable them to work with HomeKit.
  • This adds a level of complexity and cost for device makers who in many instances are small companies with only a few employees and very limited resources.
  • Consequently, most have ignored HomeKit completely and simply written their own app for iOS devices that talks to the device directly over WiFi or Bluetooth.
  • Second: Data. Just like Digital Life services, HomeKit brings together multiple devices and enables them to work together.
  • The device makers get access to the data that their devices generate, but it is only Apple that gets to see the whole picture.
  • RFM research has found on multiple occasions that understanding the bigger picture is far more useful and offers a much greater monetisation opportunity than looking at data sets individually.
  • I think that this is why device makers who understand this concept generally decline to make their devices work with HomeKit or HealthKit.
  • Third: Device. Apple has no device within which Siri can reside within the home.
  • Usage of both Alexa and Google Home show that over 60% of all usage is generated when the user’s hands are busy with another task.
  • This makes the use case of Siri on a device that needs to be removed from the pocket not as easy or as intuitive as Alexa or Google Home.
  • Furthermore, both Alexa and Google Home can hear the user from a distance which also improves the use case within the home.
  • Hence I think it quite likely that Apple will launch a home speaker device of its own or enable third parties to embed Siri in their products.
• The irony of the current situation is that Apple has by far the best smart home user experience.
• This is because Apple has understood the importance of integrating these devices together into single commands and use cases like going to bed, leaving the house or arriving home.
• This makes it easy to turn off all the lights, lock up, turn down the heating and so on with a single button press which is something that neither of the other two have come close to offering.
• Furthermore, I suspect that HomeKit will end up being far more secure than the other two but at this point in time, no one seems to care.
• Amazon has both first mover advantage and has done the best job of showing developers love and support.
• The net result is that there now over 10,000 skills available for Alexa which continues to grow rapidly despite the awful user experience offered by most of these skills.
• Consequently, I still think that this is Google’s race to lose as its product is by far the best, and its decimation by Amazon at CES seems to have shocked it into getting its developer activities up to scratch.
• Of the three, I would continue to prefer Apple but overall I still like Baidu, Microsoft and Tencent.