I’m trying to get some clarification and understanding on what is currently possible with the Smart Things API in terms of building commercial products and services.
Specifically, I’m interested in building a web app to provide a dashboard to view and control devices and a way to create custom rules or actions that could be triggered from my server.
The way I would imagine it working is a customer on my site would click a button then be taken to a Smart Things login/approval to authorize access, then be returned to my site where my application could interact with their devices. Is this possible right now? Does it require some approval from Samsung? If so, what’s that approval process like?
I’m just another smartthings customer, so I can’t say anything in terms of official approvals, contracts, certifications, all that.
But I can say that there are already two third-party products that do exactly what you’ve described. Both have a paid license business model, although it’s handled somewhat differently. Both offer a free trial so you can check them out. Both are popular in the community, and because they have somewhat different features, different people have different preferences. Both companies work very closely with smartthings to stay up-to-date on architecture changes, but again, I don’t know the details of how that works from the developer side. Both have been available for several years.
Thank you for your reply. If there are other products doing this, then it’s probably possible. I’m trying to do something more custom for a specific set of customers, so I want to know what’s being offered in terms of a development platform that I can build on. I’ll definitely take a look at what those two other dashboards are doing though. Thanks for the help.
If there are any developers out there I’d still appreciate some guidance on what’s possible in terms of a commercial product built on SmartThings.
There are a couple of smartthings employees in developer support who do monitor this specific sub part of this forum, and you’ll probably get an answer from them within a few days. They aren’t on all the time or even necessarily regular hours, they just check in as they have time available.
You can also check out the official developer portal. What you’re talking about would probably fall under “connected services” as a “endpoint smartapp” which communicates with smartthings through the official REST API.
Here’s the link to the portal:
And here’s the official schema. It sounds like your project would be in the lower right area of the diagram as a connected service smartapp. Because your project is just providing automations and the UI, not actual devices. But again, I don’t know any of the details.
Most third-party connected services in that lower right section of the schema use oauth2 to link their project to the end user’s smartthings account. Here’s the documentation on that, but I don’t know if it’s up-to-date, a lot of stuff has been changing rapidly in the last year.
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AlejandroPadilla
(Please contact @nayelyz or @Luis_Humberto_Medina )
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you can start developing a OAuth integration without any impediment, it has some limits. but you can increased permissions filling the form in the documentation, in the form you can explain more about your project.
Once the form is submitted, the corresponding team will review it, and if they are interested they will initiate direct communication with you.
