‘Works with Apple Home’ Certification Will Soon be Easier to Get for Smart Home Product Vendors
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Apple’s “Works with Apple Home” badge will be easier for smart home product vendors to get for their products in the future, thanks to the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s (CSA) certification program now assuming HomeKit support is present if devices pass tests for Matter support.
Matter enables a broad range of smart home accessories to work together across multiple smart home ecosystems, like Apple’s HomeKit and those offered by Samsung’s SmartThings and Google’s Home.
The CSA is working to make interoperability certifications smoother for device makers to obtain and easier for consumers to understand. On Monday, the CSA announced it had launched a pair of certification programs, leveraging the CSA’s Interoperability Testing Facility, or Interop Lab. The new programs aim to streamline the certification application process, reduce costs for software updates, and maintain high performance and interoperability standards.
The new programs mark a change in how devices are categorized, how they work with specific smart home platforms, and how they earn “Works With” certification badges. Previously, the process required products to not only go through CSA certification, but also through a separate testing process for each platform.
However, CSA says that Apple has begun accepting Interop Lab test results for Matter devices, allowing them to be classified as “Works With Apple Home” without performing an Apple-specific test to earn the designation, as long as the device passes Matter testing.
It is expected that Samsung and Google will also make a similar procedural change over the next few months for their SmartThings and Google Home certifications, respectively.
This means consumers should start seeing more smart home products with the “Works with Apple Home” certification badge on the products’ marketing and box art. This will allow consumers to determine at a glance whether new hardware they’re considering is compatible with their HomeKit setup, without any knowledge of Matter support or without the need to research the products’ compatibility.
The FastTrack Recertification Program
The CSA’s two new certification programs should make it easier for manufacturers to gain certification. The FastTrack Recertification Program is designed to reduce the cost and complexity of recertification.
Traditionally, with new standards and their implementation, the first few generations of products often reveal the need for improvements in reliability, resiliency, scalability, features, and bug fixes. The certification of software updates can take time and resources. With Matter, products receive regular software updates to take advantage of these improvements.
The FastTrack Recertification Program simplifies the process, and Interop Lab is used as a “light touch” check to make sure updates don’t degrade functionality. This should help speed up the deployment of security and bug fixes, helping to protect consumers from risks.
The Portfolio Certification Program
The second new program, the Portfolio Certification Program, applies to Zigbee and Matter products. It makes it possible for a manufacturer to certify multiple portfolio products within a single application, using a “parent product” as the basis.
This offers manufacturers greater flexibility, reduced time-to-market, and lower costs compared to the current Certification by Similarity and Product Family Certification programs. The CSA believes these new programs could replace the existing programs completely.
