CES 2024 was all about interoperability beyond the smart home / In between all the flashy new monitors, electric vehicle prototypes, and palm-scanning door locks shown off at CES this year, there was a trend linking the less eye-catching announcements.

 

 

CES 2024 was all about interoperability beyond the smart home / In between all the flashy new monitors, electric vehicle prototypes, and palm-scanning door locks shown off at CES this year, there was a trend linking the less eye-catching announcements.

Last year, you couldn’t mention CES without bringing up Matter. It was a pivotal year for the smart home standard, as big names like Samsung, GE, and Amazon promised better interoperability between their devices and a world of sensors, appliances, and accessories. But that promise largely started and ended with smart home tech.

This year, things were a little different at CES: the idea of making products work nicely across ecosystems bled into other areas of the showcase and rippled across a range of different devices — even putting rivals on the same page to better serve users.

Google, for instance, revealed several updates to Android that show a clear push toward interoperability. One of Google’s biggest updates was to Nearby Share, the Android equivalent of AirDrop that lets users share files with other devices that are close by. Instead of going it alone, Google announced that it’s combined Nearby Share with Samsung’s own take on the feature, called Quick Share. The newly merged sharing system will adopt Samsung’s Quick Share label and bring the “best” of both companies’ “sharing solutions together into a singular cross-Android solution,” according to Google. That should make it easier to share files across both Samsung and Pixel devices.