Samsung has updated SmartThings, its app that lets users control the company’s IoT devices, with new home automation capabilities in an apparent bid to cross-sell more of its smart home devices and appliances to existing customers.
Besides the automation features, users will get new integrations with the Samsung Health app, an intercom feature, and support for more devices through the Matter 1.4 smart home connectivity standard.
The app’s “Routines” feature — like Apple’s Shortcuts and IFTTT, this is essentially a basic, no-code conditional programming interface that can trigger tasks — has been updated to enable a good amount of home automation.
Users can now set routines to be repeated every week, every month, or every year, and SmartThings’ integration with the Health app and new 2025 Samsung TV models now enables you to set up automations, like having the lights automatically turn off when you go to bed, or have the TV start on a specific channel in the morning.
SmartThings can now also connect to Samsung Health to send sleep reports on Galaxy devices that provide metrics such as temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, and lighting intensity. This sleep tracking also ties in with the routines feature.
The app can also now drop voice messages to SmartThings-connected speakers at home. Notably, Samsung is very late in bringing this feature to its ecosystem, as Amazon’s Echo series of devices have been able to do this since 2017, and Apple introduced a similar feature for HomePods in 2020.
With the Matter 1.4 standard, SmartThings now also supports devices like water heaters, heat pumps, solar power devices, and batteries, as well as mounted on-off switches and mounted dimmable load control devices.
Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web. You can reach out to him at im[at]ivanmehta[dot]com
