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Expect first HomeKit-compatible devices soon as certified chips ship to manufacturers

The first HomeKit-compatible devices are likely now in production as two chipmakers confirmed to Forbes that they have begun shipping Apple-certified Bluetooth and Wifi chips to device manufacturers.

One part of the certification process for device makers is that they have to buy their Bluetooth and Wifi chips from Apple-approved chipmakers–Texas Instruments, Marvell and Broadcom.

These chipmakers have begun shipping their chips loaded with HomeKit firmware to device manufacturers, Broadcom and Texas Instruments have confirmed.

Apple first announced HomeKit at its developer conference back in June. The idea behind it is to integrate control of a whole range of smart home devices into iOS, rather than requiring a bunch of different manufacturer apps to be used … 

HomeKit will allow devices to be controlled individually or collectively from a single app, as well as allowing control via Siri. The HomeKit API was announced in June, with MFi specifications for HomeKit-compatible products published last month. Giving access to certified chips is the final step needed to allow companies to begin manufacturing products.

“Everyone’s getting ready,” said Brian Bedrosian, senior director of embedded wireless in the mobile and wireless group at Broadcom. “Expect to see new product launches in the next cycle of product releases.”

A number of smart home device makers have already confirmed that products are on the way, among them Elgato, Honeywell and Withings. Bedrosian says we can expect many more to follow.

“Apple is widening access to their ecosystem and we’ll see more and more products,” he said. “The goal is to create a better consumer experience for the iOS ecosystem and provide a simplified and unified approach to control home devices. We’re just starting to see the first wave of many products.”

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Comments

  1. “HomeKit will allow devices to be controlled individually or collectively from a single app”. So we expect a HomeKit application soon as Health I guess. That’d great.

  2. Oflife - 9 years ago

    Continuing from my (well cooked) comments on yesterday’s article on hotel room unlocking system, I hope that any forthcoming home control systems can be operated through a (secure) desktop browser, not just a dedicated iOS, Android or other mobile device app. I don’t want to be tethered to a gadget in order to switch the heating off in my mothers house because she forgot before going on a trip – real world scenario btw. I would like anyone with assigned privileges to be able to login and take control. So flame me.

    • standardpull - 9 years ago

      I think you make a good point – being able to control your devices via a simple web interface reduces restrictions and opens up flexibility.

      Unfortunately, many manufacturers purposefully get this very wrong – they build web interfaces into their Cloud service so that they can manipulate your devices for you – you only have control via a web interface proxy. This results in a tremendous and powerful privacy hole that gives a manufacturer/provider the potential to track your actions and activities within your own home.

      My first and only expectation is that my data, “anonymous” or not, “aggregated” or not, is never shared by devices to anyone or anything. As the potential for misuse is tremendously dangerous.

      Case in point: I have one of those cheap WIFI connected web cams (baby-cam). Tell me exactly why I should believe that the creator of the device isn’t occationally pushing images or audio out to some server on the internet? And if they did, would it be illegal considering the click-through agreement I “accepted”?

      • lowtolerance - 9 years ago

        > Case in point: I have one of those cheap WIFI connected web cams (baby-cam). Tell me exactly why I should believe that the creator of the device isn’t occationally pushing images or audio out to some server on the internet? And if they did, would it be illegal considering the click-through agreement I “accepted”?

        Because this would be very easy to detect for anyone familiar with network security, and it would absolutely devastate the reputation of the creator of the offending product.

      • standardpull - 9 years ago

        Ah, but thing is that these devices do simple stuff like chat over UDP for things like NTP and DNS. It would take very few smarts at all for it to watch occasionally via these mechanisms and then when they see a directive start the photos flowing in a stealthy way – like over “garbage” tacked to the end of otherwise legit-looking UDP packets, for instance.

        And as you know, packet capture is easy, but the analysis isn’t easy if the packets you are looking for flow very infrequently (once a month?) and are packed into something that looks innocuous. Heck, I’ve done TCPDumps before, but for a month? No way. I’m not saying that it is impossible to find such behaviors, but it does take substantial effort.

        And being just another anonymous no-name brand device, no security researcher is going to look into it. Heck, it took years to find Heartbleed. And that was open source used on tens of millions of computers (if not more) with no one trying to hide their tracks.

  3. danbridgland - 9 years ago

    It’ll be interesting to see if Nest will feel any heat from this, since they’ve pretty much confirmed they’re out of the HomeKit game.

  4. Philips announced Philips Hue compatible with HomeKit, what about that now?…

  5. So will the current Philips Hue be HomeKit-compatible?

  6. Bora (@a_boraturan) - 9 years ago

    here is a demo on Intel chip http://youtu.be/yLaEHChlAU4

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Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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