Jay/Matt have you guys had a chance to look at...

Project Chip alliance announced by Apple, Google and Amazon? I wonder if it might be a pathway to a cleaner interface to the Apple Home system.

[jay (support)]

Yes, that's been mentioned several times on the forums. We really do hope that something comes of that effort - an open standards-based approach to device communication would be extremely welcome. They have yet to produce anything tangible, and other efforts in the past to standardize (like Zigbee) have failed to gain clear traction, but hopefully this effort will actually eventually produce results. Rumor has it that the latest AppleTV has Thread embedded, so maybe that's a good sign.