A little more than a year after announcing major changes to the platform, SmartThings has rolled out what it calls SmartThings Edge, turning the smart home automation platform into something DIYers should love. The platform gives priority to local automation and lets users build and then share their own device handlers that will run on a hub.
The move will let SmartThings support more devices quickly because it will rely on users to write the device handlers (using Lua) for the items they buy and then share those device handlers with others. It’s also a smart decision given how important local control is for many smart home users who are concerned with latency and privacy.
The move reminds me of popular open-source smart home automation products such as Home Assistant and HomeBridge.
SmartThings had launched in 2013 as one of the first smart home hubs on the market, supporting ZigBee, Z-wave, and Wi-Fi devices. It also launched with branded outlets, sensors, and more. The goal was to use the SmartThings app to control devices using an app on the phone. Users could control local devices on the phone or use cloud-to-cloud connections to link in with other products.
Developers could build apps that tied together popular devices and share them with other app users. The idea was to democratize the smart home by making it easy to find cool automations and control the newly emergent connected devices that were launching.
In 2014, Samsung purchased SmartThings, intending to use to it tie all kinds of connected devices together. But the smart home struggled with mainstream adoption, and the rise of smart assistants and smart speakers as smart home hubs cut into the SmartThings market. Last year, SmartThings said it would get out of the hardware market and abandon some of its older devices in preparation for this change.
It also tweaked things on the developer side. It stopped letting users build their own device handlers in Groovy, the programming language that the SmartThings platform used, and forced developers to use an API to access features, devices, and controls. At that time, it also stopped letting developers use its IDE (integrated development environment) to build custom device handlers.
SmartThings die-hards were pissed off with the death of some of their devices and the lack of control they had under those new rules. But SmartThings at the time assured customers that this was all part of a shift to a newer, smarter SmartThings experience. Today we get a glimpse of that experience. Developers can once again build their own device handlers (this time in Lua, not Groovy), and the new emphasis is on local control. The new SmartThings Edge will run on version 2 and version 3 SmartThings hubs and on newer SmartThings hubs sold by Aotec.
This shift puts Smartthings much more in line with some hardcore smart home automation platforms such as Home Assistant or HomeBridge. The change also indicates that SmartThings’ open and all-in approach to the smart home was too early and too complicated for the mainstream user. But I am glad to see it’s still here and keeping its focus on an open and interoperable smart home.
I believe SmartThings has also very vaguely mentioned Matter will be coming to “SmartThings Edge”,
“In the future, this will expand to include more protocols and features, like the new Matter 2 standard” on the SmartThings Community Forum.
To be honest, I don’t understand the “Edge” branding. For users new to the smart home, I think that may end up quite confusing to see two platforms intermingled here. “Do I have SmartThings or SmartThings Edge?”
If the new platform is wholesale replacing the old one, should it…be branded?
SmartThings had announced last year that the groovy cloud and the IDE were going to go away, but they hadn’t actually cut access yet. In fact you can still use them today. The announcement was just that they would be going away in “late 2021.”
The new edge driver options which have just been released, the ones using Lua, are now in an open beta aimed at developers. Staff said in the forums that there will be a “beta phase 2“ for the consumer features coming later. And then the eventual full release, presumably when they will be killing the groovy options.
So we are still in phase 2 of the officially announced 3 phase transition:
https://community.smartthings.com/t/announcement-changes-to-our-legacy-smartthings-platform/197958
The vast majority of smartthings customers, as staff have mentioned multiple times, have 15 or fewer Devices and never use any custom code. In fact at this point the vast majority are probably owners of Samsung smart televisions or Samsung smart appliances.
The buzz has always been around what is now probably a 1% group of hard-core power users, but they are not the primary target market. There’s a reason the app is full of ads for things like smart oven recipes and not accelerometers. 😉
The issue is that the minority of us who use IDE are mostly the ones who were early adopters and have supported the platform since the beginning. We’re ok with change, but want a path to migrate
BTW, having participated in the discussions in the smartthings community for the last couple of days, it also seems to me that this move is less about supporting DIYers than it is about giving device manufacturers of hub-connected zwave and zigbee devices an easier way to distribute drivers for their devices within the SmartThings app. So innovative companies like Inovelli and Zooz can make the advanced features of their devices available to end consumers who don’t have any technical skill at all. It just becomes a simple install through the regular SmartThings app.
It’s true that DIYers could create their own edge drivers and share them with others, it’s just that they won’t likely have to for most devices. We will see.
Thank you JD Roberts. The article and Samsung’s obtuse marketing communications leave most of us in the dark about the Smartthings platform. Your comments went a long way to explaining what the announcement and strategy are really about. Glad to hear that the ST eco, such as companies like Inovelli and the DIY community, will have a path forward. We may be 1% of users, but we represent 99% of the innovation and promotion on the platform. Any comment on what this means for webCore?
Webcore has their own forum where many experts participate. I would suggest asking there.
https://community.webcore.co/