Hi,
Currently there’s a limitation to access any external IP from edge drivers. Many devs use bridges like edgebridge to allow access to external APIs. Does Smartthings has any plans to whitelist external IPs?
Any hacks can be tried to allow direct access from the hub itself?
Doubtful. There was a long discussion about this last year that included some ST folks because they don’t even allow having a hub on public IP addresses.
Having a HUB with a public IP is understandable. Forbidding access to remote IPs rest APIs is the big issue. Why not giving the users the control to whitelist public IPs?
This forum was set up a number of years ago so that customers could help other customers. It’s not formally monitored by Samsung staff, except for the small section for developer support and for moderating spam and harassment. I’m sure a lot of people in this community would agree with you, but we don’t have the power to do anything about it. 
It’s usually more effective to make your feature suggestion comments on the forwardfacing channels like Facebook or Twitter/X. At least those are monitored by marketing staff, who may pass it along.
The whole idea for the ST Edge environment is to run locally on your LAN. Access to a remote IP fundamentally goes against its purpose.
It’s purpose for some people. Not others, who may only want local operation for better reliability, but would still like to add in specific third-party services for convenience use cases. Choice is good, particularly for a platform like smartthings, which is not limited to a specific set of use cases. 
The purpose of how SmartThings designed it. They purposefully designed Edge to not leave the local network and pushed external integrations to other methods.
But left the smartthings app dependent on cloud communications. 
yup! strategies aren’t aligned between hub team and mobile app team 
But we all know that.