Account migration does not work for married couples and families

I got this big banner on my Smartthings app forcing myself and my wife (we both have Samsung phones) to migrate our Smartthings account over to using Samsung accounts. My wife and I unfortunately live in the same home (that must be weird for Samsung) and have been using Smartthings based control just fine with the account that was set up for our Smartthings hub. My wife and I have Samsung phones with respective separate accounts on our phone using things like Samsung Pay for respective (and separate) business accounts. Now with Smartthings account migration we are REQUIRED to move to using the same Samsung account on both our phones which immediately disables one of us from using Samsung Pay plus exposes Samsung Pay to everyone who needs to control Smartthings devices at home including our kids.

I tried to migrate the account to my Wife’s Samsung account and set up my phone with her Samsung account and immediately lost all of my Samsung Pay information and I could not use any of my gift cards. When I tried to switch back it required me to validate all of my old cards that I was using earlier. This is turning out to be a nightmare.

Did Samsung or Smartthings really think through this account migration scenario for families? I submitted a support request but absolutely no response from Smartthings yet.

Have you two been signing into SmartThings using the same SmartThings login credentials? You should have one as the owner and one as a shared user. That is what I have done. My SmartThings account was migrated to a Samsung account and my wife’s phone is still logged into SmartThings Classic app with her un-migrated SmartThings login.

Not sure why but it won’t let me log on with the old account information anymore. Do you have a Samsung phone? This could be an issue with Samsung phones only.

I do not have a Samsung phone. Once you go through the migration though the old SmartThings credentials will not work for anything anymore.

If you are a family of Samsung phone users it comes down to a choice of using either Smartthings or any of the other Samsung services (Samsung Pay, Samsung Cloud etc.). Smartthings is inherently a shared service and other Samsung services are not. Samsung phones currently limit users to use of one Samsung account at a time and that is the root issue.

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Yeah, I guess I’m not understanding how Samsung is doing this with users of Samsung phones.

But still, were you both using the same SmartThings credentials before the migration?

I would think that you should still be able to add a shared user in the SmartThings Classic app after the migration.

This seems like the only reasonable explanation…

OTOH, they released a new app that was clearly not ready to actually be used by the public yet, so who knows what’s going on at Samsung.

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Everyone should have a separate Samsung login.

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That is your opinion. I personally do not agree with that. Things like smartthings logins should not matter if you use it on one or more devices. Just as my wife and I have a joint email account that we all use for the family.
My wife and I both use the same smartthings login, we use the same ecobee login, and we use the same skybell login. These types of logins should be able to be shared so we both can have equal access to the devices.

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In order to use ALL the features of Smartthings, each user needs a separate login. It was designed for separate logins even though you may not use it that way. The OP already had separate Samsung logins. If the other Samsung login is added to Smartthings, the problem will go away. The exact situation being described is listed in the migration documentation.

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If you are not using the device you are logged in on as a Presence Sensor then yeah, it doesn’t matter. However, only 1 account can be associated with using a mobile device or tablet as a presence sensor. I have about 13 Tablets that are all logged in under my credentials but none of them act as a presence sensor.

I like the idea of using shared accounts but sometimes it really does require separate accounts.

Alexa=1 shared account
Blink= 1 shared account
Ring= 1 shared account
Ecobee= 1 shared account
Harmony= 1 shared account
Hubitat= 1 shared account
Samsung= 6 different accounts

YMMV

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It’s not an opinion, it’s how the app is intended to be used by multiple users according to the documentation.

As @rontalley pointed out, mobile presence is likely the main reason for that. Although there could be other reasons under the hood as well.

The OP appears to have come across another situation in which sharing a SmartThings account can cause a problem for two users that already have their own Samsung accounts.

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My wife and I have 2 iPhones that have the exact same Apple account credentials. Moreover, we use the exact same account credentials with SmartThings with no problems. We found the “new” app to be a failure, and with great difficulty went back to the SmartThings Classic app.

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The new app is not yet complete. Existing users of the classic app were told to continue using the classic app until instructed to switch. That’s probably why you had issues with new app.

As long as you don’t use presence in Smartthings, individual Samsung pay accounts or have multiple Samsung logins you can probably use the same log-in across multiple devices without issue. If you make use of any of the above using the same login across devices will probably lead to frustration.

The OP of this thread had separate Samsung Pay accounts for both him and his wife, thus the issue he was having with using the same login across multiple devices.

Glad that a single login works for you.

Yes, thanks for explaining that. In addition if I want to use Samsung Pay and Smartthings why am I being forced to link the two together. I absolutely want to keep those two services separate, I do not like being forced to link the two together with a common Samsung account. Bottom line: Samsung & Smartthings need to get their heads out of the sand and allow people to do what make sense to them and not the other way around. Here’s the deal: For Samsung Pay, I need to provide them with all of my personal information because it is about using credit cards and making payments. For controlling my Home I do not want to share ANY information especially my home address for sake of security. By forcing me to link the two together I am required to expose my home address for my smart home account - this I do not care for.
Honestly I am regretting spending close to a 1000 bucks on each of the Samsung phones and all my my Smartthings paraphernalia.
BTW, I heard back from Support giving me a canned response - for some reason I was expecting a more responsible reply, silly me!

I think you need a new platform. Maybe one of the others will suit your needs better. Good luck.

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Just for clarification… For people with the account migration issue are you recommending that we stop using Samsung phones or stop using Smartthings or both?

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Check out ActionTiles.com. One of the main features and use cases of the app is to create control panels with limited access to particular devices. Works great for families!

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Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll check it out.

You never mentioned privacy in your original post. You said that you were going to have to combine all of you business accounts under one Samsung login to get this to work and that was unacceptable. Which I tend to agree with. It was pointed out that your assumption of having to combine your accounts was incorrect. You could add both your wife’s and your Samsung accounts to Smartthings and the issue you are having would be resolved. Your business accounts would stay separate and you could still use SmartThings. You could possibly even use presence detection too (if you could get it to work). No combining of business accounts needed.

Now tonight, you have privacy issues even though they didn’t seem to exist when you migrated your wife’s account. At least you didn’t mention them. You also stated that you don’t like a single Samsung login for everything. In fact, you seem more upset over the single login issue than anything else. It appears to me that you are really just upset about having to change the way you login more than anything else.

Being that a new single login is the direction Samsung is taking, wouldn’t it make sense to switch to another platform that isn’t so upsetting? Others here have been upset enough with the migration process that they have changed hubs. I know I would gladly toss a $100 hub in the trash and spend the time setting something else up if I was as upset about the migration as you seem to be. Life’s way too short to be that mad over something that is supposed to be fun.

If I misread your anger, I apologize.

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