Samsung’s smart home platform beats HomeKit to Apple Watch

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Control your smart home from your Apple Watch, courtesy of... Samsung? Photo: SmartThings
Control your smart home from your Apple Watch, courtesy of... Samsung? Photo: SmartThings

Although it’s poised to win the smart home war eventually, Apple’s HomeKit is still half-baked. Case in point: hardly any smart home accessories officially integrate with it yet, let alone Apple’s own products.

Despite its parent company’s rivalry with Apple in the smartphone race, the SmartThings platform has beat HomeKit to the Apple Watch, and it makes the idea of controlling your home from your wrist look pretty useful.

SmartThings’ director and lead architect of mobile posted a video walkthrough of the new Apple Watch app today, which details how to use the iOS app’s Today widget and add actions on the Watch.

You can add actions like “Good morning” that are configured on the iPhone. Tapping an action triggers a chain of events that are preprogrammed using the SmartThings hub, like your kitchen lights and coffee maker turning on. A Force Touch also lets you switch locations if you have more than one SmartThings-connected area you want to control, like a home and office space.

“The SmartThings integration with Apple Watch underlines our commitment to building an open smart home platform that offers as much freedom as possible when choosing which connected products to use in your home,” said the Samsung subsidiary, who also has apps on Android and Windows Phone.

An update to the SmartThings iOS app with Apple Watch support can be downloaded in the App Store. Hopefully Apple will integrate this kind of functionality for HomeKit on the Watch in the near future. HomeKit just has to actually start working first.

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