SmartThings is full of makers, hobbyists, and tinkerers. I might be doing this full time but I still “tinker” around with SmartThings in my spare time. It’s not about pushing hobbyist old timers out the back door at all. There is a problem that needed to be addressed, while our original tools were great for a weekend hobby project, they were never going to scale into a solution capable of service millions of people.
I fully believe that our new API will open doors to people who could never have developed for SmartThings before.
You can now develop a SmartApp that runs at your home on a raspberry pi and do it in javascript, or java, or groovy, or any language you want. All you need is a basic understanding of how restful API’s work and you are off to the races. This is a big win for developers of every skill level, not a step back.