Over the last year, Samsung has slowly but steadily moved toward an app-only approach to its SmartThings platform. With 6% of broadband households using SmartThings as their solution to control their smart home devices, according to Parks Associates research in Q4 2020, these changes impact millions of consumers. Recently, Samsung passed a major milestone in this transition from hardware with the sunsetting of its Gen.1 Hubs last week (June 30th).
SmartThings ecosystem users who have been relying on these old hubs can control most devices through the app, and Gen.3 is still available, but Samsung will not produce a Gen.4 hub. Going forward, users who rely on a hub to control sensors or ZigBee and Z-Wave devices without app support will need to look to new third parties like hub-maker Aeotec. Alternatively, because SmartThings is currently supporting Matter, devices with this protocol will be additional options for SmartThings users once they hit the market.
It should be pointed out that Samsung has not made an official statement about Matter, but it’s worth noting that it makes good sense to follow SmartThings. As Matter is quickly become a critical interoperability standard in the smart home, the decision to embrace it would allow the company to optimize finite engineering resources and broaden the compatibility appeal of its smart home solutions, and perhaps more importantly, its growing family of connectivity-based appliances.
Parks Associates recent Connected Consumer podcast episode dives deeper into the implications of the Matter initiative for all players in the market, and consumer data from recent in Parks Associates surveys indicate that SmartThings is a top platform in controlling smart home devices such as smart lights, thermostats, network cameras, and video doorbells even when compared to aggregations of Amazon’s and Google’s brands, so further developments will impact a large user base.
