I had a query as to what the best setup was as regards having Samsung accounts (and, therefore, also Smartthings accounts):
where we have two members of a household, we each have Smarttags and want to see the location of each other’s devices, should there be one account which both of us are members of, or should we each have or own account, and be part of an ‘umbrella’ account for the household or somehow share devices with each other (can this be done?)
where I want to be a member of two households at the same time (as I want to have access to the household of my parents, to manage things for them), what is the best way of achieving this? If I just have one account per household (i.e. no separate user accounts) then that doesn’t seem possible.
Or am I thinking about this the wrong way?
Just grateful for tips as to what the usual/standard/best account structure is for the above situations.
I personally prefer to have an ‘umbrella’ account for each SmartThings Location and to use it for all the admin/management, with end users each having their own personal account. This does rather require a device dedicated for use with that SmartThings account. I use a phone that can have multiple separate users (not profiles).
If there is more than one Smartthings Location serving the same physical location I’d let the same accounts be used on each Location, but I’d never extend that to a separate physical location or household.
The reason I have the latter policy is not because of SmartThings. SmartThings manages perfectly well in those scenarios. The problem is that I also use Google and it makes sense to follow the same approach there. Unfortunately if you use a Google account in more than one Home you are running the risk of those Homes being conflated. So never ever use your Google account in multiple Homes unless that wouldn’t a problem for you and never ever let anyone outside your household use their account in your Homes.
With regard to SmartTags, SmartThings Find makes a lot more sense when individuals have their own Samsung/SmartThings account, but if they don’t have Samsung Galaxy devices there isn’t much point in their having tags set up for that account. So you basically see who does have a Samsung device and allocate the tags between them.
If i had been able to do it from day one, I’d have created an account for my home (your umbrella account - meaning everything I could sell together in one unit)
It solves part of the ‘what happens if I sell my home’ scenario. Where if your main account is the same account as the location owner these two things can never be separated…