SmartThings Now replaces the top of the SmartThings app's Home tab with cards that react to what a household is doing. The same update lets a phone control devices through a SmartThings Hub without a round trip to the cloud.
Samsung says the SmartThings platform has 470 million registered users and more than 430 certified Works with SmartThings brands. SmartThings Now builds on the existing Home Insight feature. If a Family Care member, such as an older parent, shows no device activity for an extended period, the caregiver gets a card offering a check-in or a call. When a user arrives near a pre-registered home location, SmartThings Now suggests switching on lights and air purifiers, then offers to save the action as a routine once the user has done it by hand.
The cards also learn from the past week. Samsung describes SmartThings Now proposing changes to Favorites, such as dropping an air conditioner card as use falls heading into cooler months or adding an AirDresser card as that appliance gets busier. A Routine Insight card lists a week of routine activity so unused routines can be deleted. The Family Care card is the most sensitive of the group, because it infers a problem from silence, and Samsung does not say how the inactivity period is set or who can change it.
The Home tab is reorganized into dashboards, device cards and service cards. Service cards are more compact, a Live Wallpaper shifts through the day, and a Floating Bar puts frequently used features at the bottom of the screen for one-handed use on larger phones. Samsung lists phones, Samsung Smart TVs, Family Hub refrigerators, appliances with 7-inch or 9-inch screens and Windows devices as supported surfaces.
Local control is the change with the most practical weight. When a phone and a hub share the same Wi-Fi network, the phone talks to the hub directly. Samsung says that can improve response times by about 30% compared with cloud control, a figure from its own tests under controlled conditions. The app switches between local and cloud control depending on whether the phone is at home or away, and a revised Offline Device Diagnostics page updates new network details across every registered device at once. It works on Android and iOS with the SmartThings Station, the V2, V3 and V4 Hubs, and hub-enabled Samsung TVs and Family Hub models.
SmartThings also adds Matter 1.6, the latest version of the Connectivity Standards Alliance smart home standard, which Samsung says improves stability and Group Control performance. Four device categories arrive with it: energy meters, closures such as doors and gates, irrigation devices like sprinkler systems, and soil sensors. Samsung gave no rollout schedule for any of this. For a household with a hub, the local path is the piece most likely to be noticed the first time the broadband drops.
