Mobile Players Leverage Smart Home Integration to Underpin their Long-Term Strategy

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The smart home is battleground for a range of established players and new entrants each seeking to gain a major foothold in the emerging market. In a bid to leverage their global user bases, mobile device and OS vendors are increasingly integrating their offerings into smart home platforms and controllers.

In its latest smart home report, ABI Research studies the growing role of mobile devices in the home and how the global mobile user-base surpassing 7.5 billion connections offers some of the most valuable, global IT companies—like Amazon Apple, Google, and Samsung—ways to leverage the smart home to extend their core businesses and user bases into the home.

“There are a number of drivers pushing mobile integration into the smart home, but the value of end user data is prominent,” says Jonathan Collins, Research Director at ABI Research. “Any mobile player that can push to provide smart home management can leverage that data to extend their core services, as well as be the data gatekeeper for a range of partners across multiple industries.”

Key market players are already preparing for the benefits of mobile integration in the smart home. Apple’s HomeKit initiative provides the ability to better understand its customer base and sell additional devices and services into consumers’ homes. Google gains additional insight into its consumers’ behaviors that will support its core advertising revenue stream. Even Amazon, a much smaller mobile market player, already set its sights on smart home services to help understand and target its customer relationships.

Tighter integration between the mobile and smart home environments will ultimately provide the infrastructure for a wide range of applications and integrations, further personalizing consumer and citizen interaction with the world around them. The emerging, more advanced smart home solutions will have a long-term effect on the broader IoT and enterprise markets.

“Telcos, cable companies, utilities, security providers, and retailers are already working to expand their smart home footprints,” concludes Collins. “How they compete or align with the mobile industry over the next five years will determine which players reap the greatest benefit from widespread smart home adoption.”