US vs UK Certified Devices / Plugins

I’m a little concerned about the management of US and UK device compatibilities and what role Samsung are adopting with their localised servers and OAuth. Perhaps someone from Samsung could clarify it for me.

Are Samsung going to separately enforce approved devices for each country they release SmartThings in, and require that third party contributors go through various hoops to ensure their plugins are available in other countries ? Will this apply to both inbuilt and third part contributions ? Will this be enforced such that some third party contributed device support offered in the US will just not be possible to use in the UK even by ‘developer’ routes ?

In another post Aaron said “Once we get oauth going, there will still be a bit if a delay - in the trickle down effect - in changing the integrations with third party services (some is on us, some is on them).” … this may refer to IFTTT etc rather than SmartThings third party contributors though

I bought into SmartThings on the basis of the abundant device support contributions that people were making, and indeed ST advertised in the UK but are now retracting and I’m just getting a bit concerned that the international versions may become significantly less capable and always lagging behind the US.

I guess there’s another aspect of whether it is Samsungs role to aribitrate availability of the third party contributions in this way ? I know of no other ‘HA’ product that does this with third party contributors but Samsung obviously is very experienced in this area and has to do whatever is legally required . I appreciate the inbuilt devices that Samsung might offer (support) may differ country by country and that potentially there are legal / licensing differences in these markets.

Much to my frustration and cost, I invested in Samsung ‘Smart’ TV’s but found similar issues when I developed an app for them only to find that the API was deliberately restricted in European TV models (pop up OSD for announcing telephone calls and security cams). I also have some Crestron equipment thinking I could use the Crestron Samsung TV app only to find that too works only on the US TV models, So I have had to use a different TV platform solution.

K

ooo… oooo… can I answer?!

There are essentially three tiers of third party integrations for the UK:

  1. Works with SmartThings - Third parties for which we have official engagements and deeper support
  2. Compatible Devices - Third party devices that have gone through a level of testing and QA but may not have level of compatibility, frequency of updates, etc.
  3. Custom/Unofficial Integrations - These are the devices that come out of the community and are not supported by SmartThings (see Foscam, Nest, etc.). These are not surfaced in the app natively, but can be added via the IDE using code members post on the forums, github, etc… Developers can submit their custom integrations to SmartThings for review and inclusion in the mobile app.

There will be regional limitations on some integrations. For example Amazon Echo is not sold in the UK, and therefore we can only provided limited support for questions/issues. We are an open platform and that is not going to change. If you figured out a way to make a custom [fill in the blank] integration in the UK, I do not forsee a time where we would chase you down to get rid of it. However, we might send @Chuck_Norris to threaten you a bit.

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Great…that all sounds good… So you wont be limiting some of the US device integrations covered in 1) or 2) from being available / installed in the UK and all those integrations provided through the IDE should be useable in the UK. I do appreciate you can’t support some of them if the associated product isn’t released in the UK e.g. Amazon Echo.

I’m happy once more,… or will be once the current OAuth issues get resolved.

K