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.
Alex Heath is a journalist who works for Tech Insider. He’s the former co-host of The CultCast. He has been quoted by the likes of the BBC, KRON 4 News, and books like “ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation.” He lives in Lexington, Kentucky. If you want to pitch a story, share a tip, or just get in touch, additional contact information is available on his personal site. Follow him on Twitter.
10 responses to “Samsung’s smart home platform beats HomeKit to Apple Watch”
I like Smart Things, but once I found out it’s Samsung subsidiary, I said Forget it. I won’t buy anything from Samsung or its subsidiary.
With less people like you, maybe the world will move closer towards coexistence, collaboration, and competition the benefits everyone, rather than useless bickering and pretentious prejudice. Like it or not, Samsung and Apple has more to offer by building bridges than building walls.
Samsung has a history of bringing things to market way before they are ready just to say that they are innovative and first to market. I can understand why you would want to avoid using Samsung products.
Please dont ever be in a leadership position.
I have been using home automation systems since the days of X10. I still have X10 modules in my home. I have tried many different systems, wink nest vera staples connect, hue TCP. Smartthings is the best system for my needs. It is an open system that allows me to write my own apps and integrate with my existing systems.. Apple is unlikely to make homekit availble to other platforms as Samusng has done. You will be missing out by waiting for homekit.
Clearly being first is what really matters.
Just like with smart watches… I see those first gen Galaxy Gears everywhere…. said no one ever.
Please! Being first doesn’t matter in this case: go and read Smarthings’s forum and you’ll find a lot of unhappy clients there, still wainting for the Hub v2 for several months that is suppose to fix all the problems the clients have been having for the last 2 years!! Can’t wait to see Apple getting its own hub out there (Apple TV) then we’ll start talking about quality and a new light for home automation (based on Homekit)
I’ll take home automation from anyone as long as it a) works and b) is supported on the Apple Watch. Simple really.
SmartThings has a habit of introducing features that don’t particularly work very well, so I’ll wait to see whether this is any different. Their notification center widget works about 1 in every 5 tries for me. I end up having to open the app to make it work. It also would have been nice for them to roll out an iPad app before they created a watch app.