I came back from a business trip last month and dragged my suitcase to the door of my house. Before I even took out the key, the door lock clicked open – the camera recognized my face.
After entering the house, the lights in the corridor turned on automatically, the air conditioner was adjusted to the temperature I was used to, and the sweeping robot returned to its charging base.
I didn’t touch any switch or press any remote control during the whole process.
I stood there stunned for a few seconds, and suddenly realized one thing: smart home is no longer the “rich people’s toy” I imagined before.
It seeped into my life so quietly, like air, existing but not felt.
According to the forecast of the international data company IDC, the annual shipment volume of China’s smart home market in 2025 is expected to reach 279 million units.
What is the concept of 279 million units?
Almost every Chinese household has purchased more than half of smart devices on average.
By 2026, this number is expected to exceed 300 million units.
The market size figures are even more staggering.
In 2025, China’s smart home system market will reach 687 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 21.3%, and its global share will increase from 17% in 2020 to 26%.
687 billion, which has exceeded the size of many traditional manufacturing industries.
And this growth is not linear – some forecasts show that the market size will reach 1.36 trillion yuan by 2030.
One trillion, that is another level of magnitude.
In my opinion, the indicator that best illustrates that smart homes have “flyed into ordinary people’s homes” is the user penetration rate.
In 2025, China’s smart home penetration rate will reach 78%.
Nearly eight out of ten people use smart home products.
The prefabrication rate of new residential buildings in first-tier cities exceeds 90%.
This means that if you spend several million to buy a new house, the smart home system is already standard, just like water, electricity and gas were twenty years ago.
At the same time, a survey data showed that 80.84% of the respondents had experience in using smart home appliances, and only 4.08% clearly stated that they did not intend to purchase them.
In other words, once this thing is used, few people are willing to return it.
The core change in smart homes occurs in “how people talk to their homes.”
In the past, we relied on remote controls to control home appliances, then we relied on mobile apps, and now we rely on our mouth.
The penetration rate of smart devices equipped with Chinese natural language processing has reached 91%, far exceeding the global average.
In other words, if you say “Turn down the lights in the living room a little” into the air, the device can understand it, do it correctly, and understand how much “a little” means.
57% of consumers said they frequently use smart home appliance voice assistants.
I think the significance of this number is that voice has changed from an “early adopter function” to a “daily habit.”
When a person is used to being able to control the whole house with his mouth, and if he is asked to find the remote control, he will feel that it was something from the last century.
The entire industry is undergoing a transformation from “selling single products” to “building an ecosystem”.
Xiaomi’s “Full Ecosystem for People, Cars and Homes” strategy is a typical example.
The latest data shows that Xiaomi’s global monthly active users have reached 742 million, the number of connected devices on the AIoT platform has reached 1.04 billion, and the number of hardware partners has exceeded 15,000.
Mijia App monthly active users have exceeded 110 million.
One hundred thousand devices connected together form a system that can learn and optimize itself.
Huawei is taking another path. Huawei Hongmeng Smart Home has launched a six-level smart installation package covering both pre-installation and post-installation scenarios, with the lowest threshold lowered to 9,999 yuan.
The pre-installation market starts at 29,999 yuan, and includes a full set of solutions such as smart door locks, lighting atmosphere, and voice control.
Transforming whole-house intelligence from a “customized project” to a “standardized package” and cutting the price from hundreds of thousands to less than 10,000 yuan, this turns smart homes from luxury goods into daily necessities.
The market size of whole-house intelligent systems is expected to reach 280 billion yuan in 2026, with a penetration rate exceeding 35%.
The difference between whole-house intelligence and smart single products is like the difference between fine decoration and rough housing – you have to buy the latter and make the fuss yourself, while the former comes with everything you need to move in and everything is provided for you.
The China Household Electrical Appliances Association predicts that the whole-house smart market will enter its first year of explosion in 2026.
When an industry enters the “first year of explosion”, it means that it has passed the “early adopter period” and entered the “popularization period”.
Just like smartphones have become truly popular since the iPhone 4, whole-home smart phones are also experiencing that inflection point.
The maturity of the underlying technology is the prerequisite for all this.
The Matter protocol covers 85% of newly launched products.
The significance of this agreement is that in the past, you could only buy smart light bulbs with gateways of the same brand, but now devices of different brands can talk to each other.
The penetration rate of cross-platform interconnection protocols increased to 68%.
Smart homes are changing from “isolated islands” to “archipelagos” and from “fighting individually” to “cooperating”.
The focus of industry competition has also shifted from the technical parameters of a single product to meeting users’ systemic needs for smart life.
What matters is not how bright the light bulb is or how loud the speaker is, but whether the entire system is easy to use, stable and stable, and whether the user can truly “forget” its existence.
In the past, we always thought that “Made in China” meant manufacturing for others and selling cheap products.
But it’s different now.
More than 70% of the world’s smart home terminal equipment is produced in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions.
This is not just production, but also definition – from standards to protocols to ecology, China is deeply involved in the formulation of rules for the trillion-level smart home market.
When the sound of “opening the curtains” wakes up the whole house, that scene that once existed only in science fiction movies has become a daily routine for ordinary Chinese families.
From “stacking parameters” to “understanding life”, China’s smart homes are moving faster than anyone else.
