I was eager to get our engineers to start developing products for this platform. However, I have quite quickly already become disgusted by this company.
1- They don’t give out any contact information.
2- They don’t respond to emails.
3- They don’t provide basic economics of the platform.
How can any company provide millions of dollars in development to a company that won’t even talk to you. It’s basically crazy.
I don’t think treating developers poorly will yield good results. I guess they think their the only game in town. That’s not going to last for long.
I predict this company will fail. Their simply trying to get good ideas from the developers. They aren’t supporting the developers. It’s like making a game system and making all your software people upset. It isn’t sustainable because as soon as someone provides decent support the rest is history.
Start supporting developers. We aren’t your free source of ideas and money. You must provide something of value including soft skilled areas not just some code.
Are you referring to Samsung? Or to smartthings specifically?
I’m just a regular forum member, but there are two developer advocates (SmartThings employees) who are very active in this forum, @slagle and @jody.albritton , who can probably get you whatever information you need.
There’s also a website specifically for developers which includes a partner sign-up form which is supposed to be the formal process for getting you in touch with partner support. Have you tried that?
As far as the economics of this platform, at present there is no way of monetizing official software apps. There are a couple of people who have published independent apps which integrate with SmartThings who sell them through OS marketplaces with some success. SmartRules is sold through the iOS App Store, sharptools is sold through the android marketplace, and then there are some that rely on subscription or use a contribution through their own websites like SmartTiles and the Ecobee support apps. But these are still very small markets.
Hardware partners like Logitech Harmony and Phillips hue work through the partner program linked to above.
As far as the number of homes, I don’t think that’s been published, but most estimates put it around 150,000. It may be somewhat less.
However, Samsung has announced that SmartThings will be included as a feature with all of their high-end 2016 televisions. That would hugely increase the market size, although, of course there’s no way to know How many television customers would actually install and use the home automation portion. We should also note that nothing has been released yet, and we don’t really know the details of what the TV – based system will be, or even if it will allow for partner apps.
All support can do is refer you to the partnerships email or the developers section, and like @JDRoberts mentioned, official figures on the actual number of homes is currently non-existent. The best we can do is estimate. If you are planning on investing in ST solely for the monetary gain, well, I just don’t think its possible or at that level yet.
We realize there is a gap for right now for contacting us with respect to partnerships. We are revamping that side of our business as we speak and the program will be available soon.
Saying that, there are a few ways you can contact us. Our support orginization can be contacted here: support@smartthings.com and a few different ways in our docs.