Hi everyone! We’re excited to announce the latest SmartThings Hub Beta. This beta includes both hub firmware version 0.61.X and early access to major upcoming edge driver changes. If you would like to participate check the steps at the bottom of this post to enroll.
The beta period officially starts May 13th, 2026. The exact firmware versions and their release dates can be seen below and will be updated as new versions are released throughout the beta period. New firmware updates may be released in batches to allow us to monitor performance closely, so you may not get the update immediately. The beta Edge Drivers will be available for install at the start of the testing period.
Note: Your hub will be offline for approximately one minute during the update.
Eligible Hubs
Samsung SmartThings Hub 2015 (Hub v2)
Samsung SmartThings Hub 2018 (Hub v3)
Aeotec Smart Home Hub
Aeotec Smart Home Hub 2
ThingsOne Smart Home Hub
Firmware Version Release Dates
0.61.2: May 13th, 2026
0.61.3: May 20th, 2026
0.61.4: May 29th, 2026
0.61.5: June 4th, 2026
0.61.6: June 10th, 2026
Help Us Help You
To help our support team investigate errors, please grant us temporary access to your hub logs by following these instructions:
This feature is behind configuration control and will be rolled out after the firmware release to allow us to closely monitor changes.
This updates the local online/offline detection to take into account devices reported interval of communication when determining if the device should be offline. It will mark it offline if the device does not communicate with the hub at all for twice the configured reporting interval.
This will result in fewer false offline notifications for devices that use configurations different from the default.
This allows custom drivers to adjust a device to use a longer reporting interval to improve battery life without causing offline notifications
Buttons/remotes, which currently mirror the network state, will now be tracked if they have an attribute reporting configuration setup.
Various bug fixes and optimizations
Edge Drivers
Matter 1.5 Device Type Support
Closures support added to matter-window-covering driver
Soil Sensor support added to matter-sensor driver
Irrigation System support added to matter-switch driver
Latency Improvements for Knob-controlled bulbs
Allow Zigbee and Hue lights to be controlled by knobs
Participation and Enrollment
Hub Firmware Beta
If you’d like to participate in this Hub Firmware Customer Beta program, please see these instructions for how to sign up or unenroll.
Anyone who participated in the previous beta is automatically signed up for this one, unless you have unenrolled.
Early Access to Beta Edge Drivers
We also encourage all users to test the latest features and fixes specific to our SmartThings drivers by enrolling in our Beta Driver Channel following the steps below. NOTE: This is separate from the Hub Firmware Beta mentioned above.
Signing up for the Beta Driver Invitation took a couple of attempts. First attempt: I only got the spinning circles when i selected my hub so closed the page after a minute and tried again. Second attempt, after selecting the hub, i was redirected to a blank page. Returning again showed the hub was enrolled.
RBoy
(www.rboyapps.com - Making SmartThings Easy!)
3
This is great, been looking forward to this a for a while now. Have some zigbee battery operated sensors which are experiencing this issue for 2 reasons:
The reporting intervals on some sensors are fixed and can’t be adjusted
I want to increase the reporting interval on other sensors to improve battery life but they end up going offline
My question here is which cluster parameters and/or reporting intervals is the hub looking at to determine the offline interval so I can adjust them accordingly?
I can add a little more info on how this works. The hub will read attribute reporting configurations to learn devices’ shortest maximum attribute reporting interval that is configured (you’ll start seeing some ReadReportingConfigurationResponse messages from devices in driver logs once we enable the feature). The hub issues reads when it sees a ReportAttributes message from the device for an attribute which we have not yet learned the reporting interval, and also after a ConfigureReporting message is sent to the device by the driver. We limit the number of reads per device and the rate at which we send the configuration reads to mitigate any network congestion. FYI, this likely wont be enabled until 0.61.3.
A question regarding the native step handlers and the configurable transition time:
Should it work?
I can’t seem to affect the step transition time with my custom driver changing the field __switch_level_step_transition_time which in theory is used by the native handler.
Also, the field __native_context_fields used by Lua libs to track and pass the field to native handlers seems to be empty.
Edit: Also tried forcing a device:sync_native_handler_context_fields, just in case the issue was the previous field was not populated but that didn’t work either. I guess it’s not implemented in this 0.61.2 beta.
In my custom driver there are preferences for the transition time of steps and being able to change it is crucial since for Nanoleaf lights 0.1 seconds works way better, for WiZ 0 seconds works better and only IKEA seems to be fine with 0.3 seconds although that is adding even more latency on top of the time it takes for the knob to report the rotate amount. Right now, the experience is better without native handler but custom transition time. Best experience would be native handlers with custom transition time.
Just asking because the doConfigure lifecycle handler used to be called only when adding/pairing the device, not in a driver change. So if i’m using a completely different custom driver and the beta driver needs to correctly configure the device in the doConfigure handler, a device reset and repair used to be necessary.
Something changed in the way lifecycle handlers are called?
Same behaviour in 0.61.3, I can’t seem to change the transition time of the new native handler for level steps. Should it work or it’s not implemented yet?
@jacek.gretkiewicz
The team has already helped us add your hub to the beta firmware.
Please note that, for this to be permanent, you’ll need to enroll following the instructions provided. Otherwise, you will only receive this beta firmware version and not future beta releases.
Allow Zigbee and Hue lights to be controlled by knobs
What do I read into this statement? As of today (61.3 and zigbee switch driver 2026/05/06) my zigbee lamps and dimmers are not showing in BILRESA rotary dial control setup.
It’s only in the beta version of Zigbee Switch at the moment. Production driver does not have the capability statelessSwitchLevelStep in the profile which is what SmartThings looks for to link the control devices by rotating.
Enrolling the hub in the beta channel is the first step, you have to explicitly install the Zigbee Switch driver of that channel pressing the Install button.