Developers Are Building the Next Era of Smart Homes and Buildings with new SmartThings APIs

At SDC2023, SmartThings announced three new APIs, empowering developers of all kinds to leverage SmartThings’ robust infrastructure as a platform for their innovative solutions.

The SmartThings APIs serve as the foundation for building solutions that interact with SmartThings infrastructure effortlessly. Whether building an app, device, or platform, SmartThings APIs streamline the process, making building connected solutions more efficient and accessible.

The new SmartThings APIs announced are:

• The SmartThings Home API  — With the Home API, developers’ apps can directly interface with devices connected to SmartThings hubs, letting you create applications that offer seamless device management whether users are local or remote.
  
  The Home API eliminates the demands of building and maintaining your own cloud or Matter Controller by using SmartThings’ hub and cloud infrastructure as your own. And you don’t have to make tradeoffs between efficiency and innovation. The Home API allows you to pass custom features to your app using “Manufacturer Specific Clusters”.
  
• The SmartThings Context API — This powerful tool unlocks the benefit of SmartThings’ new Intelligence Platform, and an exciting new level of automations for users. Harnessing AI, sensing, and connected devices to infer context-like presence and frequent activities allows SmartThings to recommend new and helpful experiences that increase engagement with your devices.
  
  The Context API allows developers to receive inference results in real time, and use them to help their devices respond more intelligently. Intelligence Platform features and developer access is always subject to user consent, and developer terms and conditions.
  
• The SmartThings Enterprise API — The Enterprise API enables developers building solutions for multi-family, rental, and hospitality environments, to leverage SmartThings’ infrastructure and ecosystem, including Samsung appliances, to cost-effectively build and deploy scalable solutions.

Enhancing SmartThings Build, the Enterprise API offers full programmatic access so you can build your own platform and app, without requiring individual SmartThings accounts. And your platform can be more flexible than ever, with role-based policies defining access from the device level up, allowing you to adapt to the needs of different customers. Location groups and large-scale access tokens further enhance scalability of your solutions and the businesses you support.

The new SmartThings APIs represent a significant step forward in the smart home ecosystem. Developers of consumer smart home devices and apps, as well as smart building and MDU solutions providers, now have access to a robust infrastructure that simplifies development, enhances user and property manager experiences, and saves valuable resources. Whether looking to control devices locally or remotely, leverage AI to make your devices behave more intelligently, SmartThings enables you to build smarter, scalable products, while letting you invest more in doing what you do best — developing innovative solutions for smart homes.

Developers interested in gaining early access to these new SmartThings APIs can contact partners@smartthings.com