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Amazon Sells 1M+ Smart Home Devices On Prime Day; Ring Smart Doorbell Sells Out

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Amazon had its biggest smart home sales day yesterday in history, selling over a million smart home devices, the company said. On pretty much the same day Apple deleted the entire smart doorbell category from its list of HomeKit-compatible devices.

Insult to injury?

Ring, the smart video doorbell that Amazon bought for $1 billion in February, had its best sales day ever on July 16th and sold out. Yesterday, of course, was Amazon's Prime Day, a sales event for Amazon Prime customers.

Amazon

Amazon is in a privileged position in the smart home industry.

While its Alexa-powered Echo devices might be losing the smart speaker sales crown to Google, Alexa integration via Amazon's Skills program is the most popular way of making a smart home device smart. There are now over 30,000 skills available.

As such, Amazon can see what is hot, what's getting used more, and what's growing fast, giving the company incredible insight into which product categories it should invest in.

And Amazon is clearly not shy about deploying capital to move fast.

Apple, on the other hand, has adopted a more hands-off approach to its smart home platform, HomeKit, inviting the community to build and promote compatible solutions. In the smart doorbell category, the August Doorbell Cam has been promising a HomeKit version since 2016, and Apple's HomeKit accessory list showed the solution as "coming soon."

Now that page has been deleted.

"The HomeKit doorbell situation has been mired for sometime with empty promises and delays," Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac wrote this morning. "This is an unfortunate weak spot in the Apple smart home offering which has otherwise expanded significantly in recent months."

While this is just one example, it's not clear that Apple's not-exactly-aggressive attempts to win the smart home market are meeting with as much success as the company might like.

Apple is the richest company in tech, with about $270 billion in cash and short-term investments.

While the company does not like to make large acquisitions -- and you could argue that a platform owning its own top solutions might be competitively counter-productive -- Apple might want to consider using some of that cash in creative ways to accelerate product availability and sales in the HomeKit category.

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