The application provides a control method and apparatus for an intelligent device. The method comprises: a first control instruction that is applied to a target intelligent device and is sent by a user client is received; on the basis of cloud firmware that is downloaded from a server side and corresponds to the target intelligent device, instruction parsing is carried out on the control instruction, so that the first control instruction is converted into a first protocol instruction; and the first protocol instruction is issued to the target intelligent device, so that the target intelligent device is controlled to execute corresponding control motion. According to the application, burning of firmware for all intelligent devices is not required, so that centralized management and control of the firmware and the intelligent devices can be realized well.