Newbie - developer advice request

General Discussion
1

I’m a software developer but new to home automation.

I realize that this is a very basic question but I haven’t been able to figure it out from the website:

Does the Smartthings Homehub have the capacity for me to:

  • Interface with it with using a custom written app
  • Automatically upload any data collected by the hub into a cloud server (Amazon Iot,Google Iot, Azure Iot) for analysis by a webpage.

I have read http://docs.smartthings.com/en/latest/getting-started/overview.html#get-started-overview But I cant quite figure out if the ‘SmartApps’ are still branded

Right now the Smartthings hub looks like the best option for me but I just need to uncerstand if you are dependent on creating ‘SmartApps’ and if so, are they branded Samsung (its important that my app doesn’t have any another branding on it).

Any insight you can give me would be a great help.

Thanks!

2

The situation is both simple and complicated depending on how you look at it.

SmartApps are the only way to interact with SmartThings at this time. A SmartApp can provide a REST-API, then it is called a “web services” SmartApp, but to install it, the user will still use the SmartThings OAuth web page, and see the SmartApp inside the SmartThings mobile App.

You cannot connect to the Hub directly (with very limited exceptions), but your SmartApp could ship data “cloud-to-cloud” to your Amazon, Google, Azure IoT. Easy example of this is InitialState, but ActionTiles (our product) uses a similar model.

Please let me know if you’d like a fee-based consultation to discuss this in further detail.

Terry at ActionTiles.com