…but under antitrust laws, they cannot make changes designed to solely make them more sales / money / profit, and since Samsung / Smartthings is part of matter, that causes big issues. They could say that our new Matter Hub won’t support these devices, but removing the functionally from a V2 or V3 to sell upgrades is highly illegal, despite what their Terms of service say.
Respectfully, in the US companies can absolutely make decisions whose only motivation is more profit, and they do so all the time. It’s perfectly legal. The only question is whether there is a contract in place with other terms, such as guaranteed service for a specific length of time. And there isn’t with smartthings.
Feel free to consult a lawyer, but these questions have been asked and answered in US courts already on other consumer systems that were shut down.
The terms of service that we all agreed to when we started a smartthings account said they could shut anything off at any time for any reason, and now they have.
The only recourse is reputational: maybe letting other consumers know that this is happening would damage the brand enough that Samsung would care about future potential loss of sales. 
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I understand what you are saying, but when they give the presumption of providing a service like security, and having items that if they remove could cause death or injury (even a simple light now not working) then TOS’s become void by other laws which would override them. And since Z-wave is a very simple standard which V1, V2 and V3 hubs work with, of which they have to pay a royalty, but now they are selling Matter Hubs that do not use Z-wave and require no royalty of which Samsung is part of, that then becomes a big issue.
I hear what you’re saying, and it makes sense, it’s just not the law in the US. Those same terms of service also tell you not to use smartthings for anything which might endanger health or safety or even financial loss.
Heck, they got away with discontinuing all together the dual logo system they released with ADT less than three years after it was introduced. Which I thought was pretty amazing, but turned out to be legal.
“Makes sense” and “is legal” just aren’t always the same thing.
Well I think Samsung / Smartthings should make a statement of what their 1, 5 and 10 year plans are, as right now it just looks like greed, especially as like I said their new Matter Hub does not support the ‘Secure’ Z-wave, but instead the royalty free Matter and Zigbee only. Oh and that hub does stuff for Galaxy phones too.
Matter isn’t a free certification: companies still have to pay an annual fee for that.
And Zwave just converted last year to nonprofit open source status. Which was a big deal at the time if you follow industry news.
So that’s not the motivation here. It’s just about where they think the market is going and what they think will control their own costs.
And in the US, companies are allowed to put those motivations first, as long as they aren’t breaking other laws.
It’s annoying, but if you want something that can’t be changed to remove functionality, you have to look for that upfront when you make your purchase.
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I’m not clear where the issue is here. No functionality has been removed from the V2/V3 hubs. ZWave still functions the same as it always has. Same with Zigbee. The nuances of how your various devices work has changed (DTH/Groovy to Drivers/LUA) the core functionality remains unchanged.
I’ve found, overall, that these changes have not resulted in less functionality, but actually improved functionality and reliability. As the community progresses, and we see SmartApps coming back, I can’t imagine anyone pining for the old ways.
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what upgrades are they trying to sell? Samsung doesn’t sell its own standalone hub or devices anymore.
They are providing a “free” service, we get what they want to give us.
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Ya think this switchover is bad !! The first one from Smartthings to Samsung Smartthings was even worse, the apps heart got ripped out and was replaced with poorly thought out, feature less app … which we still have today
Thats progress and thats a corporation… it exists to make money
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yes csstup, I am a bot. Not! I am not the one who wants to be a slave to a company because we get it for free, which we don’t, as Samsung does nothing for free.
I just don’t see how this business model makes sense for Samsung, and I never have. They are providing infrastructure which is costing them money, and getting essentially nothing in return. I see these changes they are making as things that a company would do prior to divesting. Do everything in their power to cut costs, then try to find someone willing to take a chance and buy it.
I think this is why we have the new smartapp architecture, to let the developers manage the hosting costs, rather than Samsung bearing the costs.
No one is forcing you to use SmartThings if you don’t like the way Samsung runs it or would prefer a non cloud solution. It sounds like you’d be much happier with a different ecosystem.
As I understand it, Samsung treats SmartThings as incentive to sell more TVs, Fridges, other appliances, etc. It their smart some platform, primarily for their own devices, hence the Life tab that primarily caters to their own devices.
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Are you paying a monthly fee for all your connections to the Samsung cloud? I know I am not. I get it is kind of a bummer to have gone from wide open anything goes to having guardrails but if I was that upset I would move to another platform. I have 190 devices. ALL of them have Edge drivers either from Samsung (for free) The vendor of the device (free ish) or from the community (also free) . yes I had to put in a weekend to get some things to move and fix automations that broke, but for the work the system has been faster and more reliable than it has in the 7 years I been with it. And to your title… the only functionality they did away with is hosting crap code on their cloud for free. So I had to add a new docker image to my pi…so what MyQ integration is better for it.
Yes Samsung has failed in how it handled this both in terms of execution and communication, but at the end, my experience is better for it. You might not be a bot, but I think you are a troll
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I did not say that. However I have used Smartthings from the beginning when promises were made of which they are now not delivering. So please stop trolling my comments.
So I am the troll on the thread I created? Exactly.
Samsung sells users data, so this is not a FREE service despite what you said. So please stop trolling me.
And Apple requiries you to buy an Apple TV or Homepod to control your HomeKit devices when away from home. There’s no such thing as a free lunch…
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Times change.