At the moment we have the ability to add members to your SmartThings “home” via the mobile app and from their they get to control anything you’ve connected to the hub.
What I’m suggesting is there be a way to grant/deny a member certain privileges whether it be only allowing them to control devices within a certain room or disallowing them to make changes to your existing setup.
An example might be giving your child access to devices in their own room using the SmartThings app while not giving them permissions to fiddle with lights or what have you in the other bedrooms, etc.
Apologies if this is the wrong category to post this. Literally made this account 5 minutes ago to share what’s been on my mind. Thanks!
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
2
This functionality is a simple and inherent feature in ActionTiles.
An ActionTiles Account holder links most or all of their SmartThings Devices to their Account and portions them out to distinct dashboards (“Panels”) each of which can be securely shared to other Accounts (free of additional charges). A Panel could easily represent a set of Devices (Tiles) appropriate for an individual child, room, home caretaker, etc…
ActionTiles is free to fully explore for 14 days. Cost is then a one time $28.99 per SmartThings Hub (unlimited devices and sharing Accounts).
It’s a great idea, and a feature that has been requested many times over the last 6 years. (You can find multiple forum threads about it.) but clearly Samsung doesn’t have much interest in it or they would have done it by now. SmartThings just doesn’t handle secondary accounts very well.
As @tgauchat mentioned, in the interim some community members developed ActionTiles (originally SmartTiles), which has over the years developed into a very popular third party paid app which fills the gap very well. (I myself have no association with the company other than as a satisfied customer.) Again, lot of discussion in the forum about this product if you’re interested in what other people have to say about it.
ActionTiles doesn’t actually change the permissions each account member has, but it does let you restrict which devices and features are displayed via custom dashboards, which achieves much the same effect.
The example of limiting a child’s access is one of the most common use cases. But it also lets you limit the access of a wallmounted tablet to just the devices in that room, or control the access of a guest, etc.
Anyway, really nice product and many people like it.
There are also some competing dashboards which are free. And a couple more paid license choices. To find these, go to the quick browse lists in the community-dash created wiki, look down near the bottom of the page for project reports, then choose the “dashboard” list. That list includes both hardware and software discussions.
Oh, and in particular in the case of a child, the question also comes up “If I use ActionTiles to limit the devices the child can see, what do I do about presence? If I install the SmartThings app on their phone to use it as a presence sensor, they’ll have full access again.”
With the Classic app, there were two easy answers: use the physical SmartThings Arrival Sensor keyfob device for that child instead of the app, or use the free Life360 service, which has an official integration with SmartThings. But to be honest, I don’t know what the options are with the new app as I can’t use it since as of this writing it is not VoiceOver accessible.
If you are the tinkering type the HosuePanel dashboard that I wrote supports multiple user profiles. You would make a profile for each child and sign them in and configure the pages and tabs of each profile accordingly. Info about HousePanel can be found here:
Or search this forum for the HousePanel discussion thread which has lots of advice about its use and the full history of how it grew up to be the best free dashboard available. Setup can be a slog, so if you want a turnkey solution use ActionTiles.
SmartThings just doesn’t handle secondary accounts very well.
