The New SmartThings Experience and You

Today is an exciting day for SmartThings customers and anyone who’s ever wanted to create a smart home. We’ve just unveiled an enhanced app experience that offers you one place to find, discover, and connect everything you need to customize a home that automatically reacts to your preferences.

Those of you who have followed us from our early Kickstarter days know that it’s always been our goal to create an open platform for the Internet of Things, and this announcement is a very important step toward realizing that long-term vision.

Here’s a look at what’s new:

The SmartThings App: Where Products, Developers, Services, and Customers Meet

Our enhanced app experience makes it easier than ever to monitor, control, and automate your home with an expanded list of uses and products. It also offers a single, streamlined way to integrate new devices, alerts, and actions via a brand-new section called SmartSetup.

Check out the below video for a full rundown of the new iOS app, which is now available for free download. The Android experience–which mirrors that of iOS–will be introduced in early June.

As you can see, the new SmartThings app experience establishes a single destination for smart home enthusiasts to create and customize a connected home that matches their needs. By embracing the innovative third-party applications and products on our open Platform, we hope to offer consumers greater flexibility and make it as easy as possible for anyone to create a smart home. To achieve this, we created three new things:

1. We’ve established an official certification program for device makers so that customers can choose from an expanded number of products that are compatible with SmartThings. (More on this here.)

2. We’ve made it possible for third-party developers in our growing community to publish SmartApps in the native SmartThings app so that all customers can access and use them. (More on this here.)

3. We’re creating a partner program for service providers so that third-party companies can offer solutions to assist SmartThings customers. (More on this here.)

hardware-certificationIntegrating New Products: The SmartThings Device-Certification Program

From locks and lighting solutions, to stereo systems and thermostats, there are already many companies inventing smart home devices. Some of the most valuable things that will one day fill our homes have likely not even been invented yet. At SmartThings, we’re embracing this wave of innovation and have created a new team lead by Kelly Liang to expand the list of devices that are certified as working with SmartThings.

The program introduces multiple levels of certification and compatibility with SmartThings and is designed to offer consumers greater confidence that the products they’re integrating with SmartThings will work properly. Once certified, these products will join our list of more than 100 approved and compatible devices from popular manufacturers like GE/Jasco, Honeywell, Kwikset, Aeon, and others that are discoverable within the SmartThings app.

And the list of SmartThings-compatible devices is growing. Today, we announced that Leviton, a leading manufacturer of lighting-control products is joining our ecosystem of compatible devices.

Additionally, we’re set to announce two new additions to SmartThings Labs very shortly: Jawbone, a smart wristband and app that helps you to understand how you sleep, move, and eat so that you can live better; and Life360, an app that allows you to view your family members on a map and effortlessly check in with them.

In addition, we’ve also partnered with CentraLite to introduce the next generation of elegant and easy-to-use ZigBee-based devices.

Interested device manufacturers who would like to learn more about how to qualify your smart device for the SmartThings Platform should please complete this form.

Discovering New Use Cases: Publishing SmartApps on the SmartThings Platform

As developers add new and creative use cases to our Platform, we add these to our app for all customers to use.

As developers submit new and creative use cases to our Platform, we’ll publish these on our app for all customers to use.

Much like Apple’s iTunes platform or the Google Play Store, the SmartThings Platform will bring together developers from our growing community who make “platform applications” and consumers who want to use them.

With today’s announcement, we are rolling out the ability for third-party developers to publish their creations (“SmartApps”) within the SmartThings native app so that they may reach SmartThings’ rapidly growing user base. This means that SmartThings customers will be able to easily discover within the app a growing collection of new use cases, making it easier than ever to browse, set up, and customize these new SmartApps to fit their needs.

For instance, many of the recent SmartThings Labs integrations that we’ve recently announced or are set to announce (for instance: Quirky, TCP, and Jawbone) have been created by developers from our ecosystem of more than 5,000 developers. Today, these integrations are available for all SmartThings customers, and as the community continues to create and submit additional integrations, we’ll continue to publish them.

Developers, you can read more about how to access our integrated development environment (“IDE”), how to create and submit a SmartApp, and the details of our approval process on the SmartThings Community forums.

Offering Added Services: Matching Customers with Professionals

In addition to showcasing a growing number of compatible product options and sharing SmartApps created by third-party developers, the new SmartThings Platform will also offer customers the ability to choose service providers to deliver a variety of solutions.

As an example, today we announced that SmartThings and Cross Country Home Services, a provider of TotalProtect home service plans, have partnered to bring a full range of services to SmartThings customers. These services range from installation services for connected devices like locks, lighting and thermostats; to home maintenance and repair services for critical home systems; all the way up to full home-warranty services.

We expect to partner with additional home service providers moving forward. By giving SmartThings customers the option to access the services of these third-party providers, we hope to make it easier than ever for anyone who wants to create a smart home to do so.

Interested service providers who would like to join the SmartThings Platform can complete this form.

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Join the conversation! 26 Comments

  1. Here’s to hoping “very shortly” for Android users is actually VERY shortly. :-)

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  2. A few things. 1) I think the hardware is great. 2) the entire “app” idea, grouping and naming of said apps are completely useless. How am I supposed to know the difference between them. 3) There should be an option that doesn’t involve me downloading a dev kit to create what I want. All the “apps” are templates. Cool. But templates are rigid. Give me the option to create from a blank canvas.

    To be frank, I haven’t touched the thing for months. It’s still plugged in though.
    Overall I’ve been dissatisfied with the Smartthings experience. Here’s hoping that it’ll get better with this iteration.

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    • Hey… I love my SmartThings. Why is #2 useless? I’m not sure I understand.

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      • The dev environment is almost as useless as a closed box system. No stack trace, less than useful APIs, frequent lockups and cryptic errors, unreliable latency/response times. Spent a few good months tinkering with much displeasure. Moved to VeraLite and settled whatever automation in less than a week.

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        • Well, you must not be a good programmer, if you cannot figure you way around the IDE. You simply log it, and you can look to see what you variables are throughout the code. Yes it is not as good or easy as a full debugger, but it certainly is more useable than the other HA products. And you can build your own devices. So you do not have to wait for them to make a device handler.

          Really I have been here only 2 months, and I love it.

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    • Hey… I love my SmartThings. Why is #2 useless? I’m not sure I understand.

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    • Cquoica,
      In IDE you have a 100% blank canvas. There are no templates. you can use other Developers work as a template but it’s not a rigid template. It’s 100% open to you to build what/how you want to. I’ve written a few apps with others help and they work great. I saw a need for something and it was not already written and so I went and did it myself. Very cool! That’s what it’s all about! Learning Groovy is a challenge but it’s not bad. The tool helps to thought the formatting/etc..

      Reply
    • Agreed, the dev environment is almost as useless as a closed box system. No stack trace, less than useful APIs, frequent lockups and cryptic errors, unreliable latency/response times. Spent a few good months tinkering with much displeasure. Moved to VeraLite and settled whatever automation in less than a week.

      Reply
    • I really think they should be able to expose all of the states of devices in a UI that lets you compose if/then rules. I know they have ifttt integration but it only allows for simple if/then. I think we should be able to do more vomplex things like defining new states based on other states and using and/or, e.g. a rule could be

      If CAR 1 is AWAY and CAR 2 is AWAY then ALL CARS GONE
      If ALL CARS GONE and GARAGE MOTION has MOTION then SEND TEXT “motion in garage”

      Where I used capitals to indicate things and states of objects and ALL CARS GONE is a new state I define. People don’t want to cut and paste code for one off specific customization. I think the api is more useful for writing new devices than for automation.

      Reply
  3. Might I suggest an “added on” date to the device list so we can easily find new additions?

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  4. Might I suggest an “added on” date to the device list so we can easily find new additions?

    Reply
  5. Great!
    Let’s just hope that we european backers recieve our initial product soon…

    Reply
  6. Great!
    Let’s just hope that we european backers recieve our initial product soon…

    Reply
  7. Great news. New app functions look promising. Did anyone else notice the camera option? Are there currently any compatible ip/network cameras?

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  8. Any improvements on mode automation? When is gonna be posible to to do a iftt-changemodeto ?

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  9. I think the new update is great, Thanks Guys. I only notice one problem, scrolling in the Things section is a bit laggy for me, is anyone else experiencing this?

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  10. It feels like this is the 4th or 5th semi-complete rewrite of the application. Unfortunately, although it is slightly “different”, it’s not really “better”. This is just one of those making changes for the sake of looking new. How in the world is there still not e-mail notifications? Having to use IFTTT to send e-mails is a pain. What about a tablet-focused interface for those of use who would like to mount an iPad on the wall to control our homes? Even a usable web interface for device control (I know that there is a web interface for developers). It just seems like the goal here is “change” and although there might be some incremental improvements, there really aren’t any new features worth getting excited about. For goodness sake – no e-mail notifications?!?

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    • These are more evolutions than complete re-rewrites, but your point is taken. I am interested in getting email notifications in place, a tablet interface, and a web interface all completed soon. The good news is, these are all on the list to get done.

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      • Very glad to see these on the list @alttext:disqus but it does us no good if we as users and developers of the system are unaware of the changes and cannot be ahead of the curve in order to develop apps and uses with the new tools.

        Since this message is over 2 months old, I assume that completed soon means that we might see it this year?

        Reply

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