This is my take on this whole issue:
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the problem … Smartthings servers often seem to become overloaded and events and other things stop working… Just look at all the outages. The current model seems unsustainable as usage keeps growing.
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the solution … This… New firmware, new api, require devices to offload the processing to servers other than smartthings servers to reduce the load.
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So If I understand correctly new device types like for ecobee, honeywell etc. will require web based processing on THEIR own servers to be compatible with smartthings in the future.
This brings up many problems… If the company is big enough they may do it. But now we have no single point of control and there will be finger pointing when there are outages.
Also, many companies are too small or I believe will not set up their own server farm and maintain it just to have smartthings compatibility. I cannot see qubino, aeon, eversource, etc settings up and maintaining servers just to support smartthings. I believe this will cause future incompatibilities with many currently supported devices.
I understand where this is coming from but don’t think it is the best solution…
On my side I do have a server or two I can use. I have a mail/dns server with public ip… I would like to see some conversion of existing devices types and smart apps going to your own server, this would be nice and would run locally instead of in the cloud and would work even if wider internet is down. At least if the server is on your local net. Probably will never see this however.