If there’s one constant in the world of commercial home automation solutions, it is that of decreasing availability and higher costs as time goes on. So too with Samsung’s SmartThings, the API of which will cease free access in October of 2026.
While this does not affect people who use the SmartThings app, any system that relies on access to this API will soon face a $4.99 per month fee for non-commercial users, with various commercial tiers also in the pipeline. While the rest of the blog post has all the elegance of the output of a ‘please generate a list of plausible excuses’ query to ChatGPT, the most likely reason is that offering free services after the sale of an Internet of Things device will never be profitable.
SmartThings was originally a 2012 Kickstarter campaign that ended up becoming successful enough that the company was bought by Samsung in 2014. Its current offerings are very much like other Smart Home products, with recently added support for Matter and interoperability with third-party devices.
If you have SmartThings integrated with your Home Assistant installation, you are also likely affected by this change if at any point you use the API. Of course, this isn’t the first time that SmartThings customers had to scramble to fix broken infrastructure, such as when in 2021 the original hubs got discontinued.
Hahahaha. Samsung has been off my list of acceptable vendors for a while. They join Sony and HP as companies from whom I will not purchase.
Yeah, their robot vacuum was the worst thing we ever bought. Sold it 6 months later at 1k loss and was a lot happier and no longer scatches on the floor.
Which robot did you end up getting?
Got married, so now has to do it themself.
They’ve been on my blacklist since the Galaxy S2/S3 days when they continued to put known-defective eMMC chips with a catastrophic firmware bug into the Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Note for 6+ months after Google forced them to fix the defect and use that firmware in their Galaxy Nexus eMMC chips.
Their software engineering was horrific – Touchwizz was an ugly mess visually, and under the hood, they did things like:
In the kernel driver for the fuel gauge, they used an = instead of >= as the condition for clearing a “fuel alerted” (aka low battery) state. They also, for some reason, would hold the device awake (greatly increasing battery drain) when “fuel alerted”. Literally one-character kernel fix I sent to their engineers – never got fixed
Horrendously broken WLAN broadcast/multicast filters that caused massive battery drain on WLANs with lots of multicast traffic
Wrote a sensor HAL that reported the wrong maximum lux value for the light sensor. Instead of fixing the sensor HAL, they went and haxed the framework to ignore the reported value and use a different one
Not a fan of SmartThings. New Samsung refrigerator had that as a feature. Connected via bluetooth. SmartThings gave wifi ssid/password from phone.
Temperature in app the.set temp, not the actual. With SmartThings enabled, fridge would not reach set temp. How do I know? Hard reset 3 times and finally did not enable SmartThings and reached set temp. In the meantime, blocked mac addresa on router. 3 months later had to call Samsung for not cooling. Keyword to get past AI support was human. Samsung said logs indicated cooling was normal. Asked how they got the logs, and was told through wifi. Asked for mac address and all of a sudden Samsung said logs were 3 months old. End result was defective unit due to hidden leak deemed unrepairable.
Waiting for refund to buy a non Samsung refrigerator that is dumb as possible.
Another successful enshiatification, great!
great profits, great e-waste, great!
tremendous , great!
Somebody always has to pay.
… and the enshitiffication hits the final stage.
We are soo far from the final stage.
Yep. You will own nothing and you’ll be happy.
i don’t get “you’ll own nothing and be happy” as a stage of enshixxification. clearly that is the goal of enshixxifiers, but in actual enshixxification, the end user is miserable and is paying through the nose for something that is worthless. hopefully the next stage after that is pitchforks.
Because everything becomes a service. Look at Apple now leasing phones as another step furthering the process.
“you will own nothing and be happy” was a term coined by Klaus Schwab (former leader of the World Economic Forum) that he (or a ghostwriter) wrote in one of his books. He coined the idea because he says that he wants to get rid of private property. The goal is that people stop buying products but leasing them. Enshixxification is a big part of the method to push people towards it. Stop people from fixing their own devices, glue every phone closed, make your car impossible to repair, make every product fail as fast as possible, disable things you already paid for and people will end up leasing their next device. The EU tried to do something similar with cars (52023PC0451), but luckily didn’t implement it. The plan was to consider cars 15 years or older to be obsolete and ban repair work suck as brake pads, engine work etc, but require by law that the car is to be scrapped. You won’t own your own house, car, tv, etc. You will own nothing and be happy. I can tell you the rest of the plan that was openly laid out for the world to see, but I try to be as non political as possible on this site.
No, i’ll ditch it and go diy.
Final Stage is when it is no longer available when Samsung closes its doors. We can hope.
Yeah it’s not enough they just became the world’s most profitable company thanks to being a platinum member of the DRAM cartel.
F00k Samsung.
The Note 3 was my last Samsung device. I saw my mate brick his brand new Note 3 by taking it out of the box and turning it on without a SIM card. It took Samsung 6 months to give him a new one and I just thought, “Screw that!”
Even having a Samsung I have not touch that thang.
I just came for the stylus, so sad other companies not even ship a simple stylus.
Motorola makes a phone with a simple stylus. I got it because I use a Palm OS emulator. And, I didn’t want to spend what they want for a Galaxy Ultra. But the general phone experience isn’t as nice as my older Samsung.
This is a big issue and why people should be pushing for open standards and protocols, however the vast majority of people who use smart things won’t even notice this change or be aware that it is happening.
It goes back to the major issue of our time, the fact that people know very little about what they use. Most of what they interact with is just a mysterious or magical black box and they couldn’t even begin to explain at a basic level how it actually works.
I dunno, specialization is a fantastic quality of the modern world. It’s fine if I understand how REST APIs work and my doctor understands how chemotherapy works. But it just works better if regulation prevents predators from using our ignorance against us (like selling fake cancer treatments or paywalling my garage door opener long after I buy it.)
Here, the doctor has to explain what and why tey’ll do to you.
There’s already a local solution for Home Assistant called “LocalThings.
I’ve only ever known SmartThings as yet more unwanted bloatware on my phone that I can’t remove.
And I know – my next phone will likely be Graphene.
I haven’t bought anything Samsung since 2014 when their “SmartWasher” and dryer refused to stay connected to my WiFi, and their stupid phone app required me to log in every week or so. All I wanted was a notification on my phone that the cycle was finished, but everything about that was made impossible by their abysmal implementation.
Eventually I worked around the problem by plugging each machine into “appliance smart switches”, which were able to handle the motor startup current, and then triggering a HomeAssistant automation based on the pattern of power draw reported by the switches.
After that joyous purchase, when Samsung announced they purchased SmartThings I was easily able to avoid whatever they were supposed to be selling.