This is a nightmare

[JDRoberts]

@ArunGupta

Most important:
Which direction SmartThings is going? Are they planning to shutdown operations or still stay a viable option for Z-Wave devices? How does Samsung fit into all this? SmartThings was taken over by Samsung but all transition related emails are coming from SmartThings. So, is it Samsung or SmartThings? At this stage, should I look to staying with SmartThings platform or reconfigure Z-Wave devices to some other platform like Hubitat or Home Assistant?

Samsung bought SmartThings more than 5 years ago and has operated it as a division. So it’s sort of like General Motors and Chevrolet (a division of GM). You could get an email from either GM or Chevrolet and either would be official communications from the company.

As far as the future of zwave at SmartThings, there’s no way for us as customers to tell for sure.

On the one hand, the hardware partner for ST is Aeotec, a major global manufacturer of zwave devices.

On the other hand, the next generation dongle for Samsung smart televisions will have WiFi, Thread, and Zigbee, as well as Matter support, but no Zwave.

So there are signs both for and against future zwave support. Which is confusing.

As far as the present: the SmartThings’ implementation of zwave is one of the weakest in its class from a customer point of view. And it’s only getting worse with the new architecture. I have previously documented the gaps as I see them:

Gaps in SmartThings’ Zwave Implementation (2022)

Just putting this here to document some observations. It would be nice if some of these gaps got plugged in the future, but I don’t know if they will. Historically, smartthings has liked to use its custom overlay (originally device type Handlers, now edge Drivers) to hide protocol-specific features from its customers, and that has driven a lot of its design philosophy. But there are some basic features that I would expect to find on any certified Z wave hub from a major company, but which are currently missing from smartthings. The ability to easily review and set zwave associations through the official features The ability to run a Z wave replace utility The ability to set up an automatic schedule for running a Z wave repair as part of regular maintenance. Most of the …

If you know that you are going to run only zwave devices, there are certainly much better hubs out there, including Homeseer, Hubitat, vera, and perhaps the new Zbox from Zooz.

SmartThings’ strength is in its flexibility in handling multiple protocols, including Zwave, Zigbee, WiFi, LAN, and eventually Matter. But as a standalone Zwave hub it drops down to the middle of the pack at best.

However: it may be that the future of inexpensive DIY home automation systems is Matter, and at present Zwave doesn’t have Matter-compatibility plans. It might someday, but for technical reasons it will be harder to do for zwave than for WiFi, Thread, Zigbee or Bluetooth.

silicon Labs, who make the zwave chips, have promised that someday there will be a chip that can make zwave work with Matter: but it’s not here yet and that would require getting a whole new hub anyway. And it’s likely at least 3 years off.

So…if it was me, I lived in the US, I ran all my critical use cases on zwave, and I wasn’t concerned about Matter, I would be looking at moving to a platform with better zwave utilities. At minimum official UI management of associations and central scenes. But that’s just me. Everyone has to decide for themselves if the many pluses that ST offers outweighs a relatively weak zwave implementation.