John Lilly, of Greylock Partners, observes how his iPhone home screen changes. Notably, it now includes a “Home” folder:

The other folder is my “Home” folder — it’s all the apps that monitor & control things in my house. Nest, Sonos, Comcast, things like that. Feels to me like we’re right on the verge of an avalanche of things like this — they’ll be different when you’re at your house, at your office, and on the road — but they’re apps that help you understand your environment and interact with it.

This is part of my nightmare of home automation and the Internet of Things: a lack of interoperability is leading to a plethora of vendor-specific applications. As a customer, I then have to remember that to talk to my thermostat, I need to use a different app than to talk to my smart meter.

Of course Fred Wilson has a point when he posits that:

Mobile does not reward feature richness. It rewards small, application specific, feature light services. I have said this before but I will say it again. The phone is the equivalent of the web application and the mobile apps you have on your home screen(s) are the features.

However, those features in home automation usually cross over multiple vendors. If I want to go into Movie Mode, I want my lights to dimm, my stereo and my tv to go into movie mode, and the blinds down. If I want to correlate my heating/cooling costs, I need to see the data of my thermos alongside my smart meter. In short: Interop is absolutely necessary. The current attempts of appliance makers to own the whole stack don’t move into that direction, though.