Internet of Protocols: WiFi and Z-Wave Dominate Smart Home Protocol Mindshare

In the alphabet soup of wireless protocols in the Smart Home, several stand out. Everyone knows Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.  Bluetooth has fragmented into Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) ,Bluetooth Mesh and plain old Bluetooth.  Consumers tend to buy what they know, which historically has given a boost to WiFi and Bluetooth over Zigbee and Z-Wave.  Given that most of the successful service providers, Vivint, Comcast, ADT and others are using Z-Wave, you would expect this to be changing.  Turns out it is.

Z-Wave, so far in 2017, has been beating out all all the other protocols in the Smart Home market except for Wi-Fi and Homekit.  For the first time since we’ve been tracking the Smart Home conversations in Twitter, Bluetooth has dropped below Z-Wave.  What does this mean?  Part of this is the growth in adoption of Z-Wave enabled products within the space.  Part of it is the efforts by the Z-Wave Alliance and its members to drive awareness as to the benefits of their protocol over others. Their recent announcement of the S2 security improvements has also ridden the wave of increased concern over the security of our increasingly connected homes.

We track the mindshare of the entire Smart Home market, as well as the major (and minor) devices and apps that form the ecosystem.  If you want to have access to these tools and predictive insights, just check out the Argus Analyzer.