A Zigbee Success Story: Aqara’s Path of Innovation

Founded in 2009, Aqara has become a leading smart home and IoT solution provider and qualified as a National High-tech Enterprise. They are committed to building a smart life service platform centered on smart devices, big data, and value-added services, enabling more people to enjoy a life of quality and comfort.

Today, Aqara’s products cover more than 30+ categories and 900+ SKUs, and the number of self-developed product categories in the industry has reached number one, capable of building various smart living scenes for the entire home. Moreover, Aqara has the largest number of products connected to Apple HomeKit and has the most complete experience scenarios. To solve the pain points of the smart home industry, such as difficulty in commissioning, installation, use, and promotion, Aqara took the lead in proposing the smart home 4S service system and one-stop, customized service in the industry in 2017. At present, they have landed 700+ Aqara Smart Home Experience Halls.

Until now, the sales channels of Aqara products and equipment have covered 42 countries and regions worldwide, serving more than 7 million global users and becoming a pioneer in leading a smart lifestyle. Recently, in the “2022 Global Unicorn List” released by Hurun Report and among 1,312 unicorn companies in 48 countries and 259 cities, Aqara is the only whole-house smart enterprise for the Internet of Things (IoT).

Zigbee: A Reliable Choice for the Smart Home

Aqara began to implement Zigbee in 2014 and launched many outstanding products, including a series of sensor products for temperature, humidity, contact, human body, water immersion, smoke, gas, light, and sleep, as well as smart switches, sockets, curtain motors, air conditioner remote controls, dimmers, door locks, and other controllers. With its impressive product line and Zigbee’s reliable technology, Aqara has achieved remarkable results. Among them, the sales volume of the Xiaomi smart home kit developed and produced by Aqara exceeded 1 million pieces as soon as it was released. In addition, Aqara’s smart switch category has also achieved solid results. The activation volume exceeded 5.8 million pieces, and the curtain motor category exceeded 8.5 million pieces. Excellent product reputation has made Aqara’s smart switches, smart curtain motors, and sensors rank first in the total sales volume of major e-commerce platforms at key sales events (i.e., Chinese Black Friday) on June 18th and “Double 11” (November 11th).

Thanks to Aqara’s promotion and influence on the Zigbee protocol in the past years, the Connectivity Standards Alliance awarded Eugene You, Aqara’s founder and CEO, the honorable title of “Zigbee Ambassador.”

Most of Aqara’s products are based on the mature, flexible Zigbee standard, which has many advantageous features. Zigbee is specially developed for the IoT and is a genuinely mature Mesh protocol. It is industry-leading in terms of low power consumption and stability for an extensive system. It has a self-organizing and self-repair mesh network, mature application layer specification, market-verified safety, and considerable market share.

In the area of commercial implementation, Aqara has reached tens of thousands of devices for a single project. The larger the number of products, the more demand on technology, and only a true Mesh protocol like Zigbee can achieve reliable and stable operation. In addition, large-scale implementations have exceptionally high requirements for power consumption and battery life, requiring the system to have self-diagnostics and a real-time status check. The operation and maintenance of these systems cannot be achieved with other protocols, which is one of the reasons Aqara chose Zigbee.

Working Together: Matter & Zigbee

With the release of Matter 1.0, devices can work together with any ecosystem in the future, whether it is Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Google Home, Samsung’s SmartThings Hub, or Apple’s Apple Home.

More importantly, Zigbee devices can support Matter through bridging. Many existing Zigbee devices, such as Aqara products, only need their gateway to upgrade firmware, allowing users to enjoy Matter without buying new devices. This further proves the value of Zigbee and demonstrates the importance of choosing a suitable protocol in the era of 

IoT. 

With its superior ecosystem, stable connectivity, and various Zigbee products, Aqara has become a preferred partner for international giants to promote Matter. In addition to appearing at the Google I/O Developers Conference in May last year and becoming one of the first batches of brands to cooperate with Google on the Matter protocol, Aqara once again appeared at the Apple WWDC Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2022 and joined with Apple to promote the development of Matter. Aqara was also mentioned at the Samsung SDC22 Developer Conference, becoming the first global cooperative brand of Samsung to support Matter.

In the future, Aqara will continue to launch products that support both Zigbee and Matter and provide improved smart home solutions and services for all.