Honestly, the upcoming $4.99/month API plan starting in October bothers me much less now than it did when it was first announced. What bothers me far more is something else: for roughly the past four weeks, communication between SmartThings and this community seems to have almost completely dried up.
In practice, the community has increasingly taken over support. There has been virtually no response to feedback from the various beta tests - Hub firmware, Edge drivers, the app. Bugs are reported, logs are collected, problems are analysed, and then there is simply silence. I find that much more worrying than five dollars a month.
It sometimes feels as though SmartThings has forgotten that “Smart Home” still contains the word Home, not Business. Many people here run installations with hundreds of devices and have invested four-figure sums in them, and ultimately most of those devices could run on another platform. What keeps people on a platform is not the logo on the app, but confidence: confidence that the platform will still be there tomorrow, that someone is maintaining it, and that when something breaks there is a realistic way of getting it fixed.
Just look at the history of this community. How many platform bugs, driver problems and firmware issues have been identified here through cooperation between community members and SmartThings employees? And how many of those fixes subsequently benefited thousands or millions of SmartThings users who have never even heard of this forum? That relationship had real value.
Even if SmartThings’ business priorities are increasingly focused on B2B, partners and SmartThings Pro, the bugs in Edge drivers, Hub firmware and the app are still being found here. They are often reported with detailed reproduction steps and logs, sometimes after days or weeks of testing, and not infrequently with an analysis of the root cause or even proposed code changes. That is an extraordinary resource for a platform to have, yet lately it feels as though nobody is interested in talking to it.
IFA Berlin next week illustrates the contrast rather nicely. Samsung is there, this time without a booth, mainly as the main sponsor of the Creator Hub (influencer marketing!), while the Open Home Foundation, the organisation behind Home Assistant, has a booth in the Smart Home hall and is actively inviting users to come and meet the people behind Home Assistant, ESPHome and the other projects.
And that is really the point. Imagine attending an event like IFA and being able to sit down with SmartThings developers, architects or product managers and discuss the platform with them directly. Not through several layers of support tickets and not through a form that disappears somewhere, but simply engineers talking to the people who actually use, test and extend what they build.
At the moment, we cannot even achieve that level of communication here, in the SmartThings Community.
There is a Hub firmware beta running right now, yet apparently nobody can spare 30 seconds to post a short note when a new beta firmware is released. When somebody discovers a reproducible bug, even a simple “thanks, we’re looking into it” has become rare. We have reached the slightly absurd point where I end up thanking SmartThings after noticing that a bug I reported has been fixed, without SmartThings ever having acknowledged the report in the first place.
Then, sooner or later, the invitation for the next beta test arrives, asking us to report our findings in the thread or contact developer support - the same developer support that effectively no longer exists for us.
That is the part I think SmartThings should be worried about, because people are not leaving platforms like SmartThings because $4.99 suddenly makes their smart home unaffordable. They leave when they lose confidence in the platform.
And they move to platforms such as Home Assistant because there is visible development, close interaction with the community, and developers who do not consider communicating with their users beneath them. Users, contributors and developers may have different roles there, but they are all part of the same project. There are no second-class citizens.
A community like this one is not a support burden. It is an asset, and for years SmartThings seemed to understand that.
I’m no longer sure it does.