This year installed two Samsung Air Conditioners and bought a Philips Hue lamp, so it made sense for me to go for the Samsung Hub instead of buying the Philips Hue Hub to control just the lamp.
I wish I could say that I found SmartThings to be a thriving environment… but in truth, it looks like a bunch of people fighting against Samsung inertia, lack of interest/resources, …
You want one example? MQTT support. It is really possible that in 2018, if you want to interface with MQTT devices, you have to buy a RaspberryPi and install Smart Home on it, just because Samsung didn’t bother to support a ISO communication standard that was created in 1999, and also put in place “security” rules that blocks anyone willing to implement it by him/herself?
But Samsung is doing so because they are investing tons of money in integrating themselves all the products on the market nowadays… yeah right! 90% of the devices on GitHub are just ignored. Sonof/Shelly/Tasmota/countless products just are “not interesting” to them.
Terrible documentation for users, terrible documentation for developers, two concurrent apps none of which is working great. There are posts from 2015 from developers asking where to find the icons, and the problem as of 2019 is still not solved!!! Not some monster-supertechnical-feature, but the icons!!!
And, btw, SmartThings is not sold in many markets, I’m in Europe and had to buy it via Amazon US and pay international shipping costs.
I managed to get my Shelly working, but honestly it was a pain, and in the same amount of time I could have installed and configured another hub, maybe a cheaper RaspberryPi.
The feeling is that, once they’ve sold you a couple of motion and water sensors, they don’t really care about the product that much. I would bet that in a few months/years, it will be discontinued. Not because of the product, which could be really great, but because of myopia from Samsung.
What do you think?