LG has recently acquired an 80% stake in Athom, a company based in Enschede, Netherlands which operates in the smart home arena.
The deal includes LG being able to acquire the remaining 20% within the next three years.
This move would appear to be a bid to enhance LG’s connectivity within open smart home ecosystems.
LG plans to integrate Athom’s connectivity with the existing LG ThinQ platform.
Athom offers the smart home hub Homey and flagship Homey Pro, devices that connect with home appliances and connected devices.
The Homey Pro, can connect to tens of thousands of devices and supports various connection protocols, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Z-Wave, Matter and Thread.
The Homey App Store offers around 1,000 applications for connecting and controlling home devices from brands such as Philips Hue and IKEA which is very common for these types of platforms.
The problem that LG might have with this is that home automation hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet, for sure it’s much more popular now than when we started out with it but, it’d be hard to call it truly mainstream as yet. And just what effect Matter will have on things has yet to play out as that allows many devices from different makers to talk to one another.
This is however an interesting move by LG.
