There must be some forward thinking to have led to Samsung to dropping Z-Wave, despite the huge investment people have made in their automation systems. I’ve read a few posts with comments that are guesses why it was dropped, but not seen anything definitive. Is there any official reasoning?
That happened back in 2023 with the SmartThings Station, just a business decision like any other. The discussion would be here:
4 Likes
It is pretty clear that Samsung sees Matter as the way forward for their ‘Hub Everywhere’ consumer products, and they have said that Zigbee is pretty much only still onboard as it gets a free ride. This seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy.
Samsung/SmartThings/Aeotec have made little or no comment with regard to Z-Wave in the standalone hub series following the release of the V4 hub. Indeed the most I can recall is a vague ‘the V3 will be around a bit longer but watch this space’ hint leaking out from Aeotec (who remain largely focussed on Z-Wave). So the idea that Z-Wave has been dropped seems rather premature.
Given that SmartThings has proved capable at keeping up with most Zigbee/Thread developments with a decade old product, whereas it has largely been left behind by Z-Wave developments, I just can’t see why on earth they’d lock themselves in to a specific generation of Z-Wave again by having it onboard. I can see why an external solution would appeal though, especially to Aeotec. Whether that external solution goes down the dongle or bridge route is another question but I think there is time to see how things play out.
2 Likes
If they would make routines across hubs local and implement a way to migrate non-zwave devices to another hub while keeping non-compatible devices on the original hub, most the disappointment about zwave woiuld go away….those with zwave could rock their V2/V3, buy a spare for safe keeping and rock new hardware for the rest of the system. Or enable zwave dongles. Either would go a long way in reducing folks getting disgruntled.
1 Like
I’ve bought a spare v3 to protect my investment, but that’s not going to work in the long run
3 Likes
Commercially and especially globally it is unfeasible… with the Zigbee, Matter and Thread platform they gain many more new users than a fragmented Z-wave frequency by region.
3 Likes
Yes. Aeotec makes several Z-Wave USB sticks –as well as other Z-Wave devices–and it might benefit their product and marketing plan. The stick to which I linked, above, is not only Z-Wave LR device, but also talks Zigbee protocol.
Not to lift anyone’s spirits too much, the following image appears on the liked page. Pretty cool, eh!
The image is of the Aeotec Autopilot Smartserver
4 Likes