SmartThings, the popular smart home platform by Samsung, continues to evolve and expand its capabilities. The integration of wider industry protocols, such as Matter, has allowed users to choose from thousands of smart devices to enhance their setup.
Jaeyeon Jung, Executive Vice President at Samsung Electronics and Head of the SmartThings Team, discussed the latest advancements in the SmartThings platform. He emphasized how Matter support is crucial to Samsung’s vision for expanding the ecosystem, enabling devices from partners like Philips Hue and Aqara to seamlessly work with SmartThings.
One exciting development is the Hub Everywhere feature, which brings hub capabilities to Samsung’s consumer electronic devices, including soundbars. This integration further solidifies SmartThings as a powerful and versatile smart home solution.
To empower developers and partners, SmartThings has introduced a new SDK and enhanced API. These tools allow partners to extract more value from the SmartThings platform and incorporate SmartThings Home AI into their apps. Additionally, the Context API, a machine learning engine, enhances smart home solutions by utilizing available data.
In terms of device tracking, the SmartThings Find network has reached an impressive milestone with over 300 million Find Nodes. This network includes both Samsung devices and findable devices from partnering companies. Building such a vast network presented challenges that required overcoming technical obstacles and optimizing the infrastructure to handle signals from millions of devices.
While SmartThings remains closely tied to the Samsung ecosystem, it is not intended for integration into core Android. However, Samsung has introduced Map Full View, a visually appealing feature that simplifies the setup and operation of the smart home, making it more accessible to users.
Responding to customer feedback, Samsung redesigned the Galaxy SmartTag2 to be smaller and more water-resistant, catering to those who want to attach it to pets. The SmartTag also has potential use cases in business environments, as evidenced by a successful proof of concept for a logistics partner with tracking requirements.
The introduction of the SmartThings Station has been well-received, with its integrated button and wireless charging functionality proving to be popular among users. Samsung plans to expand the availability of the SmartThings Station to more markets in the future.
Looking ahead, Samsung’s future iterations of SmartThings hardware will prioritize support for Matter, Thread, and Wi-Fi protocols, with Z-Wave support requiring an additional chip. This ensures compatibility with a wide range of devices and further enhances the flexibility of the SmartThings platform.
As SmartThings continues to grow and innovate, Samsung remains committed to bringing the benefits of a smart home to more users worldwide. Stay tuned for further updates and exciting advancements from the SmartThings team.
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