PMA/Airfuel developer Powermat joins rival and Qi developer Wireless Power Consortium; Powermat CEO says Qi is now the dominant wireless charging standard
Powermat was pushing its own wireless charging standard, but has now signed on with the competition
Context & Ripple Effects
Powermat helped found the PMA, which merged with A4WP in the A4WP-PMA merger and rebranded as the AirFuel Alliance — the last organized alternative to Qi. The endgame was set when Apple joined the Wireless Power Consortium in 2017, putting the iPhone's weight behind Qi.
With the consortium now building Qi2 on Apple's MagSafe and major Android makers following, Powermat's CEO is conceding what the market already decided: Qi is the dominant standard, and Powermat is abandoning its own.
First-order effects
- AirFuel Alliance loses its flagship developer: Powermat now contributes to the rival Qi ecosystem it built PMA to compete against, leaving AirFuel without its founding champion.
- The Wireless Power Consortium absorbs the last credible competing camp, ending the two-standard split that forced device and furniture makers to pick sides or dual-license.
Second-order effects
- Remaining AirFuel members face the same calculus Powermat just made — stay on a fading standard or migrate to Qi — accelerating AirFuel's slide toward irrelevance.
- Retailers and embedded-charging buyers (furniture, automotive, hospitality) who hedged between PMA/AirFuel and Qi can now standardize on one spec, collapsing demand for dual-standard transmitters.
Third-order effects
- The pattern — Apple joining, then shaping Qi2 around MagSafe, then rivals folding in — shows standards bodies winning by absorbing the losing camps rather than out-engineering them, pointing to a single-consortium structure for consumer wireless charging.
- Interoperability shifts the moat: once every transmitter speaks Qi, differentiation moves from which standard you support to how fast and efficiently you implement the newest revision like Qi2 25W.
The trend: Wireless charging is consolidating around a single consortium-backed standard, with device-maker adoption — not technical merit — deciding which rival camps survive.