SmartThings
More info
- Creator
- Alex Hawkinson / SmartThings Inc.
- Released
- Owner
- Samsung (2014)
- Type
- Smart-home IoT platform
Samsung's smart-home platform — a 2012 Kickstarter hit that Samsung bought two years later.
SmartThings began as a 2012 Kickstarter campaign by Alex Hawkinson: a hub that tied together lights, locks, sensors and thermostats regardless of make, plus a cloud and an app to automate them. Samsung bought the company in 2014 for an estimated $200 million and made it the backbone of its ecosystem of connected gadgets.
The platform speaks several radio protocols — Zigbee, Z-Wave and now Matter — and exposes an API for custom integrations. A 2020 rewrite moved much of the logic to the cloud, which annoyed enthusiasts who wanted to run everything locally. SmartThings now ships preinstalled on Samsung's phones and TVs, often alongside Bixby.