Die Marke „homeOS“ ist ans Licht gekommen, und Apples Smarthome-Lösung könnte sich wieder aufraffen.

Next Monday, this year's WWDC (Apple Worldwide Developers Conference) will kick off. The adjustment of the operating system naming rules and Apple Intelligence are considered by the outside world to be the highlights of this event. However, Apple's smart home ecosystem, which has been quiet for a long time, seems to become the protagonist of WWDC25. Recently, there are reports that Apple may have applied for the trademark "homeOS" in many places around the world through a shell company named Home Operations Suite LLC.

Actually, as early as the autumn of 2021, homeOS appeared in Apple's recruitment information, which stated that "you will work with Apple's system engineers to learn the internal working principles of iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and homeOS". In 2024, traces of homeOS also appeared in the code of tvOS 17.4.

If Apple really wants to make achievements in the smart home ecosystem, homeOS is obviously a necessary condition. Now iOS can no longer serve as the center of Apple's smart home. Companies including Apple, Amazon, Google, and relevant domestic enterprises all use smart speakers rather than mobile phones as the controllers of the smart home ecosystem. The key lies in that smart speakers with voice control provide a more seamless experience. It is much more convenient to directly wake up the smart speaker with voice for operation than to unlock the phone and then operate the app.

Currently, Apple has two operating systems for the home environment, namely audioOS for HomePod and tvOS for Apple TV. Originally, audioOS was supposed to be like Amazon's Fire OS, Google's Google Home, and Huawei's HarmonyOS. However, Apple's conservatism in the smart home field and the poor market performance of HomePod dragged down audioOS.

HomeKit is a smart home platform launched by Apple in 2014. Its core selling point is that in addition to providing linkage between smart home devices, it can also ensure user privacy and security. Currently, the communication between HomeKit devices is based on the local area network and uses ble (Low Energy Bluetooth) for end-to-end communication. Since it doesn't need to go through the cloud, user data is basically stored locally and can still run when the network is disconnected.

However, to ensure the privacy of the HomeKit platform, Apple has set high standards for the certification of devices supporting HomeKit. Smart home device manufacturers need to pass the MFi certification first and then apply for HomeKit certification for individual products to obtain the "Works with Apple HomeKit" certification. In addition, Apple requires devices to be encrypted with RSA3072 encryption bits and apply the ultra-secure Curve25519 elliptic curve cryptography encryption algorithm.

The result of such a complex mechanism is inevitably an increase in cost. More fatally, Apple's HomePod mini and Apple TV don't have the same dominance in their respective fields as the iPhone. In other words, in the smart home field, Apple lacks the ability to maintain a high premium for HomeKit devices, which makes the HomeKit platform have the defects of expensive devices and a narrow product line.

Before the autumn of 2022 when the Matter protocol was born, if consumers wanted to build their smart home ecosystem centered around HomeKit, they would inevitably face an incomplete experience and be unable to achieve whole-home intelligence. As a result, the HomePod series of products couldn't serve as the "switch" for whole-home smart devices. Coupled with Apple's misjudgment of the smart speaker market, the strategy of "the smartest among speakers and the best-sounding among smart speakers" didn't win consumers' favor. So, it's no exaggeration to say that Apple's smart home strategy has been standing still in the past few years.

Although Matter, as an open-source and unified application layer protocol for smart homes, does help solve the problem of limited product variety in HomeKit. As long as users' devices have the Matter logo, they can be connected through any smart home ecosystem and can also be called through other smart home ecosystems supporting Matter.

However, from Apple's perspective, the excellent compatibility of the Matter protocol is a double-edged sword because it will also weaken Apple's control over the smart home ecosystem, allowing users to build whole-home intelligence bypassing HomeKit. So, Apple needs a homeOS similar to Amazon's Fire OS and Huawei's HarmonyOS to maintain control over the smart home ecosystem and make HomeKit a revenue source on par with MFi.

However, it's still difficult for Apple's homeOS to meet users in the short term. Whether it's Amazon's Fire OS or Google's Google Home, their core functions highly rely on smart voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant. But now, the AI-driven personalized version of Siri has encountered "major engineering problems", resulting in its failure to be launched as planned.

While competitors are integrating Gemini and Claude into their smart voice assistants, Apple obviously won't directly use the current Siri in homeOS. You know, Apple's product philosophy has always been to use mature technology rather than backward technology. Different from desktop and mobile platforms, the operating system of smart homes is voice-centered. When competitors offer more intelligent, flexible, and memory-capable voice interactions, how can Apple use the current Siri, which is criticized as "stupid", to compete with them?

So, the reality is that Apple does have reasons to launch homeOS and re-integrate its almost fragmented smart home ecosystem, but it doesn't have the ability to launch homeOS immediately. The failure to launch the personalized version of Siri has forced them to slow down their layout in the smart home market. Therefore, their current registration of the homeOS trademark may just be a precaution. When the AI-driven Siri is truly launched, homeOS will meet users.

[The pictures in this article are from the Internet] 

This article is from the WeChat official account "Three Easy Life" (ID: IT-3eLife), written by San Yi Jun. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.