I’m adding a new Smart Things hub to a 2nd house we just completed. I already have Smart Things in my current house, so I would like to create a new account for the 2nd house, but be able to control both from the same APP on my Galaxy S20 phone.
What is the best way to handle this? Just create a new location on the App for the new home, or create a totally new account for the new home?
Ideally, I would like to create a “new” account for the new house, and just “invite” the 2 accounts to be able to control each other, but I don’t see anywhere on the App on my phone where I can “log out” from my current ST account?
I believe you have to sign out of your Samsung account. In the app, click on the 3 bar Menu lower right, then the gear icon top right. Press “Samsung Account” then sign out at the bottom.
My ideal is to have a separate account to own each Location (or a group of Locations that are in the same physical Location that don’t need to be kept separate) and have a separate device to control that account. I then do anything administrative with that account and don’t use it on any other Locations. My personal account/phone would only ever be a guest on the Locations and used for day to day control purposes and for anything that actually needs a Galaxy phone like SmartTags and Find.
I have tried using two users on a non-Galaxy Android phone but SmartThings seems to get a bit confused - you end up with two mobile presence devices even though the users aren’t on the same Location. It is also tedious.
Logging out from a Samsung account on a Galaxy phone isn’t quite as significant as logging out from the Google account, but it is still something you probably don’t want to do.
I just use a lower end Nokia phone that I had purchased as a contingency and that I also use in preference to a tablet in the home.
If I wasn’t using that I’d probably be using a ‘hand me down’ phone or tablet, but at the moment all the ones we have around have rather old versions of Android on them so aren’t useful.
We’ve only had a limited selection of tablets here (Asus, Huawei, Lenovo, and Samsung) and it has run fine on all of them in their time. There have been plenty of reports of SmartThings not running on some Samsung phones and tablets though. I can’t comment more generally.
I’m curious as to why you want each location to be on a separate account?
I am using a Galaxy S20 FE to control 2 hubs in 2 different locations under the one account. To switch to each location, all I have to do is touch the name of the location to the right of the “house” symbol in the upper left of the app, and a drop down appears with the name of each location. When I select the location, it’s devices appear on my favourites screen. Pretty easy.
I’m also running ST on an iPad, but it is a newer (a couple years old) iPad Air.
My desire to have 2 “accounts” for each location is based on a future time when I might want to sell one of the houses. By having it’s own dedicated account with ST, I can “sell” the house with the ST account, and transfer ownership of the ST account to the new owner.
It also just seems “cleaner” in my mind, however I understand it might be just as easy to create a new location with the existing ST account.
I’m going to see if the iPad can be used to control the new location and create a new account, but if not, I’ll probably just add a new location to my existing account.