Key wireless charging groups A4WP, PMA agree to merge
The alliance should help bring a little bit of clarity to the fragmented world of wireless charging technologies. — Powermat technology, pushed by the PMA, is already available at select Starbucks. — LAS VEGAS—Two down, one to go.
Context & Ripple Effects
Wireless charging entered 2015 with three incompatible standards fighting over the same coffee shops and phones: Qi's Wireless Power Consortium, A4WP's resonance approach, and the PMA, whose Powermat pads were already deployed at select Starbucks. With this agreement, announced at CES in Las Vegas, two of those three camps are combining into a single alliance against Qi.
The move is a defensive consolidation: the merged group was later formalized (made official mid-2015) and rebranded as the AirFuel Alliance, but the corpus shows the unification never produced a winning standard — Powermat itself ultimately defected to the Wireless Power Consortium.
First-order effects
- A4WP and PMA members now face a single alliance instead of two fragmented ones, reducing the standards burden on device makers and venue deployers who had been forced to choose between resonant and inductive camps.
- Powermat's Starbucks deployment becomes an asset of the combined group, giving the merged alliance an existing retail footprint while Qi remains the standard embedded in shipping phones.
Second-order effects
- The merger does not stop the defection cycle: Powermat, the PMA's flagship developer, later joined the rival Wireless Power Consortium, its CEO conceding Qi had become the dominant standard.
- Apple's decision to join the Wireless Power Consortium rather than the new alliance removed the highest-profile holdout from the anti-Qi side, draining the merged group of the partner that could have forced OEM support for AirFuel.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to standards markets resolving by attrition: once Apple joined Qi and major Android makers adopted Qi2 25W alongside the iPhone, the interoperability fight ended not because the merged alliance failed technically but because one camp captured every major device maker.
- For venue operators like Starbucks, pad deployments become stranded infrastructure when the standard behind them loses — a structural lesson about betting retail buildouts on standards coalitions rather than shipped devices.
The trend: Wireless charging is consolidating from a three-standard land grab into a single de facto standard, Qi, as device-maker adoption — not alliance membership — decides which specifications survive.