Apple's Smart Home Plans Start to Materialize & Smart Home Security with Ultraloq's Raj Sundar

Andrew O'Hara (0:00)

Welcome everybody to another exciting episode of Smart Home Insider. You've got me, your host, as always, Andrew O'Hara, and joining me this week is Raj Sundar, who is the Senior Director of Product Management at Xthings. They have one of the first cameras that are getting certified with Matter, and they launched several new locks in the past week, including ones with UWB and Deliro. So we're gonna be talking about all of these things later in the episode. Raj, thank you so much for hanging out today.

Raj Sundar (0:33)

Thank you so much for inviting me to the podcast. Appreciate that.

Andrew O'Hara (0:37)

I'm excited. I mean, some of these locks we have seen at CES for a while. So I'm really excited to just sit down with you, not in a crowded convention hall, and just actually talk through some of these specifics.

And I'm really curious at how the Matter and Aliro stuff has been going, so I'm really excited for our talk later in the episode. I hope you are.

Raj Sundar (1:00)

Same here. Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew O'Hara (1:03)

Before we get into the news, which there has been a good amount, I wanted to call out some of the reviews because I was doing some tidying up of everything. And I had noticed we have over 350, I think it's like 366 reviews or ratings right now on Apple Podcasts, which is incredible. So thank you so much to everybody who has been leaving reviews on there. Lemon knows, that was one of the critical ones. I understand Lemon, they said that there is too much on just general hardware and not enough on Smart Home. And I get it, sometimes I just get excited about tech stuff, even if it isn't all within the Smart Home. So we'll try to keep it mostly narrow. But sometimes I go off. Retired Technologies, 5 stars, like that I push in interviews sometimes, which, sorry, Raj, I promise, it'll be a good interview.

We had B Benton, 5 star, they say they really like being able to break down the complex topics and I love being able to do that and things like Aliro that we're going to talk about and making it easier to understand because it can get kind of confusing. And then Steck, another 5 star review, loves the length, likes the mix of news, editorial reviews and suggestions. So thank you to everybody who's whether they've given a rating or written a review. It really means a lot. It has helped this show go on for as long as it has.

So Raj, the big news this week that we have to talk about is how many things have started to kind of leak out about Apple's new Smart Home tech. And what has gone on, the reason that we have so much of this extra news is because of the iPhone Duo. I've got like these 3D printed dummies here. But basically Raj, I guess there's been a couple people like Aaron Paris and PDFU over on Twitter have decompiled the version of Xcode that has the iPhone Duo simulator. And then they were going through that and they found a whole bunch of references to Apple's Smart Home display. And one of the first things is on iPhone Duo, specifically on Apple's actual phone, there's two new stand-by mode faces. One of them will be a grid view for cameras, and the other one will be a modular, it's called the Home Modular face, and it'll allow you to show a dedicated view of your different Smart Home accessories and devices. And it seems like those are probably going to end up on the actual Smart Home display.

I'm curious Raj, I mean, first off, this is relevant to you because you make Smart Home devices that could literally live on those types of standby mode displays. What do you think of the iPhone Duo? Do you think you're going to try to get one around launch?

Raj Sundar (3:49)

Yes, we would definitely because we also want to test how it behaves with some of our cameras as well as if they use it as a device and how different it is in terms of the lock experience, especially with our approach on lock and things like that. But I also read about the rumors. So it's probably some of these displays may appear on the HomePad. So I think a rectangular display has been missing on the Apple lineup.

That could probably be it.

Andrew O'Hara (4:26)

That is, there is so much random things. I'll go through the timeline here of what we've heard. But I'm curious, do you think when Apple announces this Smart Home Display, do you think they're going to finally add support for matter cameras?