On March 13, the 2026 China Home Appliances and Consumer Electronics Expo (AWE) opened grandly in Shanghai.
During the exhibition, the “OneConnect Smart Home Standard”, led by the Smart Home Working Committee of the Global Intelligent Internet of Things Alliance (GIIC) and jointly formulated by China’s leading companies, was released, setting a milestone for accelerating the process of intelligent interconnection of all things in the smart home industry.
According to the GIIC Alliance Smart Home Working Committee, my country’s smart home industry is currently in a critical leap period towards a trillion-dollar scale.
Against the dual background of an aging population and a surge in demand for intelligent household chores, the long-standing “chimney” ecological fragmentation between brands not only increases the R&D adaptation costs of enterprises, but also seriously restricts consumers’ cross-brand experience.
In order to respond to the intelligent demand brought about by changes in the demographic structure and in response to the policy expectations of national mandatory standards in 2028, the GIIC Alliance has joined forces with the China Household Electrical Appliances Research Institute and leading companies in the industry chain such as Haier, Midea, and Huawei to jointly release the OneConnect smart home standard.
The OneConnect smart home standard has four core advantages and is an “independent solution” that better understands Chinese families.
Different from the limited categories such as lighting that were focused on in the early stages of the Matter Agreement, the OneConnect smart home standard breaks through the long-standing “brand island” problem of smart homes. The core goal is to achieve interoperability between different brands and different platforms.
First, unified interconnection across brands and ecosystems.
This standard has been designed to meet the overall living needs of Chinese families from the beginning. It has covered about 12 major categories and dozens of subcategories of equipment, covering core home appliances and smart devices such as air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, TVs, door locks, kitchen appliances, and cleaning robots. It can support complex, multi-device, and multi-brand whole-house linkage scenarios, providing a foundation for the large-scale implementation of smart homes.
Secondly, it is multi-protocol compatible and more friendly to existing equipment.
This standard is not bound to a single technical route, but is compatible with multiple communication protocols – it also supports mainstream protocols such as ZigBee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Star Flash, etc., and can access a large number of non-IP devices through heterogeneous gateways. It fully takes into account the reality of the diverse equipment types and huge inventory in the Chinese market, effectively reducing industry switching costs and avoiding “reinventing the wheel”.
Third, strengthen local control and take into account both usability and controllability.
This standard attaches great importance to local control capabilities in the architectural design. Devices can complete discovery, control and scene linkage within the LAN, reducing dependence on the cloud.
This design not only improves response speed and stability, but also ensures network availability and data security, and is more in line with the actual needs of Chinese users for reliability, privacy and user experience.
Fourth, safety complies with national standards and standards are easy to implement.
In terms of security, the standard has designed mechanisms in line with China’s market needs and security specifications in network distribution, communication, OTA upgrades, etc. At the same time, the standard has specific descriptions in terms of interface definition, communication process, data structure, status management, etc. This greatly facilitates implementation by equipment manufacturers and developers and effectively ensures true interoperability between devices of different brands.
It is worth noting that the relationship between the OneConnect smart home standard and the Matter protocol is not a simple substitution or competition, but a synergy and complementarity based on different market focuses and industry roles.
In the future, both parties will, on the premise of ensuring data security and compliance in each region, be committed to the coordinated development of technical routes, jointly promote the interconnection of the global smart home industry, and create greater value for consumers and industries.
The official release of the OneConnect smart home standard not only achieves a breakthrough in underlying technology, but also achieves a comprehensive value reconstruction on the consumer side, industry side and ecological side.
For consumers, the OneConnect smart home standard completely breaks the “bundling” and restrictions of a single brand ecosystem, giving users the right to freely combine home appliances across brands.
In the future, when consumers purchase smart devices, they only need to look for products with the exclusive logo of “OneConnect”, and they can buy with confidence and get a seamless interconnection experience, saying goodbye to the cumbersome troubles of being disconnected across ecosystems.
For equipment manufacturers and developers, this standard significantly lowers the threshold for technology adaptation and product access.
Relying on clear standard definitions, open source SDKs, and open testing and certification tools, enterprises can quickly complete multi-platform integration at lower costs and focus their core energy on innovative breakthroughs in featured scenarios. It also helps domestic enterprises effectively avoid certification fees of hundreds of thousands of yuan in overseas agreements, significantly reducing operating burdens.
For the industrial ecology, this standard will help break the long-standing fragmentation pattern and promote the development of the smart home industry in a more open, collaborative, and orderly direction.
Through the guidance of unified standards, the upstream and downstream of the industry chain will form a closer collaboration mechanism, improve overall operational efficiency, enhance the independent controllability and international competitiveness of China’s smart home industry, and help build a healthy and sustainable new smart home ecosystem.
The OneConnect smart home standard has achieved a substantial leap from theoretical specifications to industrial effectiveness.
At the AWE 2026 site, leading companies such as HiSilicon, Midea, Hisense, and Changhong have taken the lead in demonstrating the physical results of cross-brand interconnection, indicating that the first batch of products adapted to this standard have met the market conditions and are about to enter the mass launch stage.
Standing at a new starting point, the advancement of the OneConnect smart home standard will enter the stage of comprehensive implementation and continuous iteration, focusing on the following directions: First, speed up the implementation of the standard.
The alliance will continue to improve the construction of supporting systems, accelerate the launch of certification testing tools, development kits (SDKs) and product evaluation mechanisms, promote joint debugging and large-scale application of multi-brand and multi-category equipment, and ensure that unified interconnection capabilities are truly implemented in products and scenarios.
The second is to continue to promote iterative upgrading of standards.
On the basis of the existing standard framework, we will continue to optimize interconnection capabilities in conjunction with industry practices, gradually launch versions 2.0, 3.0, etc., further expand the supported categories and depth of interoperability, and continue to improve the collaborative experience across hubs, multiple terminals, and multiple scenarios.
The third is to actively embrace new technological innovations.
Focus on cutting-edge directions such as generative artificial intelligence and AI agents, explore their application potential in smart homes and smart spaces, promote the upgrade of human-computer interaction and automation capabilities, and lay out future-oriented technology and standard systems in advance.
The fourth is to expand the boundaries of intelligent space applications.
On the basis of home scenarios, it will gradually extend to communities, offices and wider smart spaces, gather industry consensus, systematically plan the key technical architecture and standard systems required for the next generation of smart spaces, and promote the development of smart homes to a higher level.
The release of the OneConnect smart home standard marks a key turning point for China’s smart home industry from “ecological fragmentation” to “open collaboration”.
It is rooted in China’s huge market demand and complete industrial chain, based on independent technology and based on open cooperation.
When refrigerators, air conditioners, lights, and speakers at home can communicate freely across brands, a new era of truly convenient, personalized, and imaginative smart life is accelerating with the implementation of this standard.
