What I find fascinating about this is that hundreds of thousands of SmartThings customers are unaware that they are in an equivalent boat. The SmartThings Hub is dependent on the SmartThings Cloud to run (the latest version has limited offline functionality, but definitely no access via App; so no way to add new devices or automation rules and connections).
As a tiny division of Samsung, SmartThings is at similar risk to be discontinued, and the SmartThings “Terms of Use” are quite clear about this:
We may suspend or discontinue any part of the Services, or we may introduce new features or impose limits on certain features or restrict access to parts or all of the Services.
Just because this Hub costs only $99 instead of $299 doesn’t make the uncertain situation much better for the consumer. But then again, consumers face same or worse fate if Gmail shutsdown; or the Google Play store, or iCloud. We don’t buy #SmartHome hub hardware; it is just a gateway to the “free” service.
It’s not the cost; it’s the Effort
A “well automated smart home” will take countless hours of configuration and tuning. In the case of SmartThings, this is accomplished by adding and setting device options (a non-trivial task itself, though this is much easier than in legacy systems), and then installing dozens of “SmartApps” with parameters such as time or other triggers and resulting actions and notifications, links to third-party services like IFTTT and Amazon Echo Alexa, etc.
If SmartThings discontinues all or part of their Service, I’m not just out $99; No… I’m left with a dumb house until I can purchase a replacement service and hope that it is compatible with my devices, and doesn’t have as difficult a learning curve to manually reproduce the “intelligence” I had trained into SmartThings. There are standards for device communication (Z-Wave, ZigBee and so on), but no common standards for home automation programming, and no export / import of the rules encoded in the SmartApps I wrote or use.
