According to Mac4ever, Apple is preparing its return to the smart home with a full range of accessories — a wired video doorbell, an ultra-wideband smart lock, a thermostat, a temperature sensor, indoor and outdoor cameras, and a camera-floodlight for the garden. The setup is unusual: Apple designs, but LG manufactures, sells and handles support. The products will carry only the LG logo — Apple's name appears nowhere, not even in the FCC and UL filings. Every device speaks Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Thread and Matter, so they slot into the Home app. A keynote is expected on 13 October for a 6-inch smart-home hub, a HomePod mini and a refreshed Apple TV; the LG accessories would follow sometime in 2027.
What interests us here isn't the hardware — it's the choice of Matter as a common language. When a device speaks Matter, it's no longer locked to a single app or brand: the user adds it to the Home app, but also to the app of their choice. For anyone building a connected-device app, that's both freeing and demanding: value no longer comes from 'owning' the device, but from the experience you build around it. At Devside, that's exactly our ground — TagHue, for instance, flashes Philips Hue lights in time with iPhone notifications. Today's lesson: bet on open standards (Matter, Thread), then win on the experience, not on lock-in.