Per the title: where can I find the end of life policy and procedural handling for home appliances that connect to smarter things. I’m looking to make a small investment in my home for an air conditioner and would like to ensure that it outlasts my future intended sales date.
If you mean Samsung SmartThings ™, the SmartThings platform itself does not offer any guarantees. The terms of service that you agree to when you set up your Samsung account say that they can change anything at any time, including withdrawing any features, and that changes may cause devices connected to the platform to no longer function with it. So if that’s not what you are looking for, Samsung SmartThings is not a good match to your requirements.
As far as individual appliances, The only guarantee is the normal one for the warranty, And again, Samsung terms of service say that they can withdraw or change features at any time.
You can find a number of threads in this forum from people who have purchased Samsung smart appliances or televisions and then found features that they relied upon withdrawn within a year or two of purchase. But there’s no recourse, those are the terms of service you agreed to when you sign up for the SmartThings app. 
1 Like
I don’t get why Samsung’s been in the quasii-support setup for so long. I guess all these guys are, I can’t imagine they make a lot of money on no-subscription licensing included in the up-front cost of the product when they have to support this forum alone after.
It’s funny that none of these guys thought make a $40 a year or so sub, have better support and options, and more promises of future upgrades and so on.
My opinion, just an opinion, which I’ve expressed since the Samsung acquisition first happened, is that this was a buzz acquisition. Samsung wanted the name and the positive buzz Associated with it in 2014, and that’s exactly what they got. They immediately jumped to the top of every blogger and journalist list for Smart home companies. And that gave them time to build out the features they wanted for their big profit items: expensive smart televisions and appliances. Plus, a nice consumer-friendly app to build on, which they did.
I don’t think they ever cared about the hub, or that much about the platform. At this point, well over 90% of SmartThings users don’t have a standalone hub.
SmartThings staff have said multiple times publicly that even of the customers who do have a standalone hub, most of them have fewer than 15 devices, and never use any custom code.
The people who frequent this forum, of course, are the power users. The ones with lots of devices trying to make smartthings do lots of things. And the ones most vulnerable to the glitches and the platform changes. But we are a small minority of a small minority. So I just don’t think they’re going to put a lot of corporate resources into what our particular group wants.
2 Likes
It’s time for Samsung Corp to go ‘Guess what is new? We already have it there, we are building on smart home automations with our new and fully compatible cross platform hubs!’
Then again, they won’t do that cause it would make sense and money.
That is part of their plan, but it’s all based on Matter. And the idea that most people will be using hubs that are built into their expensive Samsung smart appliances and televisions.
Like I complained to you in the other thread, just make Matter wifi devices so they can switch routers without resetting them all!!!
That isn’t effortless to me. I ended up getting more Linkind light bulbs btw, those old GE Zigbees were just crap. So now I have 9 Matters so if I have to change my SSID or Password, even worse heh. That’s the nice thing about a dedicated hub, just plug it into an ethernet port and that’s it as far as that goes.
1 Like
I have changed WiFi routers a couple times and I reuse the old SSID and Password, so there is no need to reset my WiFi devices.
1 Like
When you replace your Router, it’s a good security-wise method to update the SSID (which is used as a salt, at least in WPA2) and the Password.
You can of course make the new one the same as old, but that’s not terribly good opsec.
If you use an Eero, the default is to give the Wifi password to Amazon. Samsung also wants that Wifi pass, ostensibly so they don’t share it with the NSA but to make it easier to setup new devices.