Stratechery: Apple's home arrives in LG boxes, and the agent standard launches without Amazon

Apple's home hardware, and the agent standard Amazon has not joined

"Apple and LG, The House For Everyone Else, Agent Standards and Amazon" — Stratechery

1. Apple is entering the smart home through LG, and LG takes the brand. The two companies are developing a line that includes a video doorbell, a deadbolt lock, a thermostat, indoor and outdoor security cameras and a floodlight camera. The hardware carries LG's name even though both companies built it, an arrangement Bloomberg's sources call "second-party." Several of the devices support Thread and Matter, the standards that let smart home gear work across competing platforms, and the lock adds ultra-wideband so it can unlock as its owner walks up. LG filings are already visible in the FCC's database under names such as "LG Smart Thermostat" and "LG Smart Deadbolt Lock." 3 The accessories are expected at Apple's Home event on October 13, where Apple is expected to show the hub they connect to — a square display of about six inches that sits on a counter or mounts to a wall — along with a new HomePod mini and an upgraded Apple TV. 4
2. The shelf Apple is entering is Amazon's, and Amazon put new hardware on it the same day. Amazon-owned Ring, which already supplies the doorbells and cameras in a lot of homes, announced its first smart lock on October 7, the day the Update published: a deadbolt with a crank that powers it enough to open once the battery has died, on sale in the United States in the first quarter of 2027. Ring introduced it with four 4K cameras — the Outdoor Cam 4K Plus, Spotlight Cam 4K Plus, Floodlight Cam 4K Plus and a pan-tilt Indoor Cam 4K. 5 Apple's doorbell, lock, cameras and floodlight, all made by LG, aim at that same line.
3. A new agent standard arrived on October 6, and Amazon is outside it. Meta and Sierra — the enterprise AI company co-founded by Bret Taylor, who also chairs OpenAI — published the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how a consumer's personal agent signs in to a business, identifies itself and completes tasks. The founding partners are Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart; Meta's own announcement adds the contact-center vendors NiCE and Decagon. A session is built on OAuth and begins when an agent visits a company's site. The agent can browse as a guest to check stock or a returns policy, and once a task needs the customer's account, the customer signs in and chooses read-only or write access. The company then decides how the agent works: through its ordinary web pages, through APIs built on standards such as MCP and OpenAPI, or through a company agent of its own. Sierra plans a version 0.1 specification later this month, then design workshops and a reference implementation. 67 Taylor told CNBC that "it is kind of chaos until such a standard exists," and said he expects OpenAI and Anthropic to take part; both are absent from the founding group, as is Amazon. 8 Amazon has held its position for a year. It cut Meta's Muse agent off from shopping on Amazon.com, saying the agent browsed without identifying itself and stored customer credentials, and it blocked Perplexity's agent and sued the startup; in August the Ninth Circuit ruled that the person using the agent is the one accessing Amazon's computers, which left Amazon's contract claims as its remaining route. Amazon runs an agent of its own that it says works the way it wants every agent to work: Buy for Me, which shops other brands' sites from inside the Amazon app, identifies itself and lets brands opt out. 9

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