Huawei Hongmeng Releases Soon Smart Home Cross Brand Interconnection Speeds Up

Recently, Huawei's official announcement will officially release harmonyos, which can cover mobile phones and other mobile terminals, on June 2. Hongmeng system, which started planning as early as 2012, is positioned at "building an intelligent world of interconnected things" at the beginning of its design, and takes smart home as one of its three major plates.

Midea took the lead in releasing a number of home appliances supporting Hongmeng before Huawei's mobile phone was equipped with Hongmeng system. According to Jiang Xu, vice president and CTO of Midea IOT, this year, IOT of inner America will continue to deepen the cooperation with Hongmeng system to cover all categories and nearly 200 products. Millions of Midea products equipped with Hongmeng system will face the market and realize the full link from hardware to software.

It is not difficult to foresee that with the continuous expansion of Hongmeng ecosystem, the era of intelligent interconnection of all things will accelerate. However, from the current situation of smart home, there are still some bad experience problems, such as slow distribution network speed, inconsistent protocol, complex operation steps and so on. In addition, the objective reality that it is difficult for manufacturers to break the commercial barriers in the short term is also a big pain point of popularization. While intelligent interconnection is worth looking forward to, it also needs to be treated rationally.

Co construction of ecology

With Android and IOS occupying 68.63% and 30.99% of the global mobile operating system market share respectively, Huawei Hongmeng must have a sufficient number of users to gain its own place. As a breakthrough point, Hongmeng has been committed to providing a unified language for the intelligence, interconnection and collaboration of different devices at the beginning of the design. It proposes a distributed concept based on the same system capability and adapts to various terminal forms, and supports multiple terminal devices such as mobile phones, smart wearers, PCs, smart speakers, etc.

According to Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, previously disclosed at the Huawei China ecological conference that more than 200 million devices carrying Hongmeng operating system are expected by the end of this year. At the same time, Huawei's third-party partners are also fully matching the Hongmeng operating system, including smart home, health, travel, education and other terminals. This year, the number of matching devices will exceed 100 million.

The 21st century economic reporter saw on the official website of Hongmeng that there were three parts of the one-stop distributed application open platform Huawei deveco studio, smart home and smart travel. From the perspective of smart home, Midea is the first home appliance enterprise to cooperate with Hongmeng system.

Jiang Xu told reporters that in the process of cooperation, engineers from both sides will be stationed in each other“ Huawei's team has done the underlying technology, including the accumulation of mobile phone capabilities, but they did not do the gene and accumulation of household appliances. How to position Hongmeng as the IOT operating system and really land in the home appliance industry is a process of co construction. "

According to its disclosure, Midea will embrace the whole category of Hongmeng system this year, "it will first land on one or two models of each category, and then gradually spread out."

At present, Midea IOT has cooperated with more than 100 partners such as Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom, State Grid, oppo, vivo, Hisense, Tencent, Google and Mercedes Benz to achieve a more intelligent and more user-friendly scenario with the partners. For Hongmeng, Midea is certainly not the only partner in the field of home appliances. Next, Hongmeng will cooperate with other home appliance enterprises.

For the future prospects of smart home, 36 krypton investment director Shi Yaqiong believes that optimistic expectations“ From the perspective of investment and commerce, it is certain that demand determines supply. On the basis of sufficient supply, there will be supply with high quality and low price. " Shi Yaqiong further pointed out that based on the background of 5g era, "although 5g's low latency, large bandwidth, wide connectivity and other features are not specifically designed for smart home, they will undoubtedly give smart home a better experience."

According to IDC report data, China's smart home market will exceed 200 million units in 2019, reaching 208 million units. Under the influence of last year's epidemic situation, China's smart home equipment market will slightly decline in 2020, but there will also be 200 million units. It is estimated that the shipment volume will be close to 260 million units in 2021, with a year-on-year increase of 26.7%.

According to his observation, the number of smart home patents in China will start to be the same as that of the United States from 2019 to 2020. Manufacturers are constantly increasing investment in product research and development, market investment and channel expansion, and the artificial intelligence algorithm team has become the standard configuration of smart home companies.

The increase in R & D investment has led to the category expansion from single product to whole house intelligence. At the same time, with the popularity of smart home among consumers, categories other than black and white household appliances have also begun to become intelligent. In this context, Shi Yaqiong believes that in this context, non front mounted categories are likely to be done again. "Take the sweeping robot as an example, the sweeper with the functions of automatic cleaning dishcloth and automatic picking up broken hair has gained market recognition."

Cross brand interconnection to be solved

According to the analysis of the current market situation and development prospect of China's smart home industry in 2020, the market size of smart home will reach about 153 billion yuan in 2019 and 182 billion yuan in 2020. The development of Internet of things and 5g technology will promote the rapid development of smart home industry. However, there are two common problems in smart home appliances on the market.

One is that in the connection of devices, slow distribution network speed, non-uniform protocol, complex operation steps and other issues affect the convenience and stability of user intelligent experience. The above problems are related to the insufficient attention of some enterprises and brands to hardware technology innovation.

Jiang Li, COO and vice president of 5g industry, believes that connection will become the decisive point of smart home industry. In his opinion, simple network solutions, including low-power Bluetooth, ZigBee and WiFi, have been widely used. However, with the increase in the number of home connected devices and the complexity of connection scenarios, the network requirements of smart home will increasingly shift to industrial level.

In addition, for the technology application part of smart home, the problems of "device discovery" and "service enabling" should be solved“ The promotion of major standard organizations and the rise of industrial alliances have, to a large extent, solved the problems of equipment connection and management, and have become mature and stable. However, the interface standards need to be further explored. "

Jiang Li predicted that the core of the next stage will be the business logic and the optimization and intelligent technology of each bottom layer, including the operating system, interaction and presentation, which will become an important investment direction for IOT manufacturers“ In the final analysis, it is to return to how to let users get better services with lower learning costs. "

In addition to the poor connection experience, smart home products often have multiple entrances in the use process, and the separation between multiple scenes will greatly reduce the user experience. In Shi Yaqiong's view, the product interconnection of the whole house intelligent is the foundation, and the operation around the scene is the future trend.

As for how to solve the fragmentation problem of smart home scattered in various brands and scenes, Shi Yaqiong proposed that "the interconnection of intelligent products in the whole house is the foundation, and the operation around the scene is the future." At present, home appliance enterprises including Haier, Midea, Gree, yunmi, Skyworth and other home appliance enterprises have built their own whole house Internet Ecological platform based on various scenarios, but they are still in a state of their own.

From this point of view, smart home has a long way to go to realize the "interconnection of all things". In this regard, Xiang Jiangxu believes that the industry pain points are common, and the short-term commercial barriers also exist objectively“ After all, their commercial interests are there. However, it is good for all of us to realize that there is a need for unity rather than competition in basic agreements and platforms through the Standardization Association. "

In fact, this is also the direction that the industry has been trying to break through for many years. It is reported that as early as 2017, the association standard of cloud and cloud interconnection of smart appliances, which was led by China Household Appliance Association, proposed a feasible scheme to realize interconnection of intelligent systems of different home appliance manufacturers. According to previous media reports, at present, more than 20 enterprises, including Midea, Haier, Boxi appliances and Hisense, have joined the above standards.

The release of the association's standards undoubtedly makes the interconnection of different brands of smart appliances a step forward, but there are still unsolvable problems. Sun Li, CTO of TCL industry and general manager of Honghu laboratory, once said that "firmware diagnosis related to hardware" and "after-sales service related to manufacturers" cannot be solved by interconnection standards.

In addition, Xiang Jiangxu also believes that cloud cloud interconnection can solve some problems, but can not achieve seamless docking“ But this is a good start. I hope that China's giants can form an industry alliance. We are not only connected by cloud and cloud, but also connected locally, which can reduce the impact of network disconnection. " Say to Jiang Xu.