When Samsung bought SmartThings back in August of 2014, it was quickly clear the plan was to make that brand the one everyone associated with Samsung's smart home products. And over the last couple of year, that is exactly what has happened. Everything Samsung does with the smart home gets released under the SmartThings brand, but if you owned products from before the SmartThings integration happened you still had to use the older Samsung apps.
Those days are over, because Samsung has finally decided to merge all of its IoT apps into the SmartThings app.
According to Samsung, more than 40 apps are being consolidated into SmartThings right now. The big ones Samsung users will most likely be familiar with are Samsung Smart Home and Samsung Connect, but any other company or product Samsung has acquired along the way that once had its own app will soon be consolidated into SmartThings. As SmartThings is embedded in more products, rolling everything into one app was inevitable.
Alongside this consolidation will be a huge UI overhaul, expected to be available for both Android and iOS this spring. Developers are being promised SmartThings is still a highly open platform with support for custom in-app panels. These panels let developers customize the UI and create scripts to pull their products deeper into specific functions, and according to Samsung there are over 300 of these panels for many of the devices SmartThings integrates with.
This change has been a long time coming, but it's clear with the combination of improvements coming to SmartThings this spring that Samsung still has big plans for making your home smarter.
