Amazon Says 60,000 Devices Are Now Alexa Compatible, Google Assistant is at 30,000

Amazon updated its smart home connected devices page earlier today to reveal that there are now “more than 60,000 smart home devices that can be controlled with Alexa.” These devices are supported by “7,400 unique brands.” First noticed this morning by Android Police, The 60,000 figure is two-and-a-half times higher than the 20,000 devices that Amazon announced just eight months ago and the 7,400 is more than double the 3,500 brands from September. The previous announced reflect a rise of 400% over the previous eight months. Android Authority suspects that part of this jump is due to the proliferation of smart plugs and other similar devices on Amazon.com. C. Scott Brown wrote this morning:

“A likely explanation is that the company is including the hundreds of Chinese-made smart plugs that pop-up on Amazon.com, which all look suspiciously alike. In many cases, these white label products are just a leased (or sometimes stolen) design from another company with a new logo. It’s possible that Amazon didn’t include these products in its totals and now does, which would be a decent explanation for the huge jump.”

Smart Home Products Increasingly Need to Support Voice Assistant Access

Regardless, there is clearly has a lot of momentum behind Amazon’s third-party device support for Alexa and the latest revelation comes on the first day of the annual Google I/O developer conference. Google last updated its figure to 10,000 Google Assistant-compatible devices in October 2018. That reflected a doubling of device support in just five months. Today, Google announced a new figure of 30,000 Assistant-connected devices from 3,500 manufacturers. That is 3x growth in just six months. Even though it doesn’t yet match Alexa’s 60,000 connected devices, the growth rate is higher.

With that said, both platforms are supported by a large number of third-party devices. It is increasingly hard to find devices that don’t support at least one voice assistant and often two. The laggard here has been Apple. Device support for HomeKit numbers in the low hundreds according to Apple’s website. The company recently hired former Microsoft and smart home startup executive Sam Jadallah to address this among other challenges.

This article was updated at 4:07 EDT to reflect newly released Google data on connected devices. 

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