Apple’s Smart Home Strategy Gains Marketing Support

There are signs that Apple is increasingly looking to shore up its position among its user base and defend against it straying to rival smart home ecosystems. During March, the company worked to provide its customers with more information about what Apple provides in the smart home space trying to ensure that, while it may not have a single attention-grabbing smart home voice device like rivals Google or Amazon, it is carefully building out smart home value. 

Apple launched its HomeKit architecture and third-party certification process in 2014. Over the years, a range of devices have passed certification and been supported by inclusion in Apple retail presence; but even so, the technology and the offerings have seemed disparate. Apple’s Home app, designed to integrate HomeKit device control into a system embedded in iOS, launched in September last year.  Combined with more and more HomeKit devices coming to market, it underpins a new push behind smart home from Apple.

In February, Apple CEO Tim Cook took time in the company’s quarterly earnings call to mention his own use of HomeKit and Siri to carry out daily routines in his home. In March, Apple refreshed its smart home presence by delivering a consumer facing page on it site listing all the third-party products that are HomeKit certified, as well as a tutorial video on the potential for using Siri and the home app for smart home management.  

In addition, in September 2016, Apple added HomeKit support to its 4th generation Apple TV device.

Apple smart home efforts have long been overshadowed by the more aggressive strategies of key rivals, Google, and more recently, Amazon. Google has a range of key smart home devices through its Nest acquisition but is also pushing its Google Assistant voice platform into the home with its dedicated Google Home voice frontend device. Since starting shipping its Echo device in 2015, Amazon has swiftly pulled a in a long line of smart home device and appliance partners, as well as home service providers into its ecosystem. Apple’s new list of HomeKit compatible devices is really a basic service to support any smart home consumer play and despite the scale and value of its iOS user base, the list is only at best comparable to those from Amazon and Google Home

Key to both Google and especially Amazon’s smart home projects are their voice control services. Of the three, Apple alone has no dedicated voice control smart home device. Instead, Siri is leveraged in AppleTV and iOS devices only. We have written before about Apple’s strategic approach to bring smart home systems in support of existing products rather than as a device driver in itself.

That Apple staunchly leverages smart home functionality to maintain and extend the value of its mobile devices continues the company’s long standing device-centric strategy. But much of that draws on a very different relationship not just to smart home but also to its customers. Both Google and Amazon have incentives to leverage smart home to support their core businesses. Smart home data has the potential to offer increasingly valuable insights about the lives, demands, and preferences of consumers – both important aspects of both Google advertising and Amazon retail operations. For its part, Apple may have an advantage in just supporting its hardware business. The company maintains it captures only the minimum data related to its home app and connected devices. Personal data remains only on the control device – iPhone or iPad – rather than in Apple’s cloud service. Even when the cloud dependent Siri app is used to that end, user data remains hidden from both Apple and its third-party device providers.

For the great wealth of players that have entered the smart home market, smart home is an application that can help support existing core business. How transparently or engagingly services are interwoven with those primary businesses will be important. But increasingly, it will be how end users feel about sharing their personal data with those primary businesses that will ultimately drive which smart home devices and suppliers they will opt to use. Apple may yet have the strategy to win over end users even without the appeal of its own voice dedicated hardware.