Samsung says SmartThings has over 45M monthly active users and works with more than 5,000 devices, as it announces new developer and partner programs
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's smart home push began with its CES 2015 pledge to build an open Internet of Things platform, followed quickly by a refreshed SmartThings Hub with a subscription monitoring service and hubs embedded in its 2016 HD TVs. The Connect Home mesh router extended that footprint into networking.
The new developer and partner programs are the monetization-and-ecosystem phase of that decade-long arc: Samsung is publishing scale numbers — 45 million monthly active users, 5,000-plus supported devices — to recruit third parties, a base it would later report at 66 million around the Galaxy SmartTag launch.
First-order effects
- Device makers joining the new partner program get a certified path into a claimed 45-million-user install base, while developers get official tooling to build against 5,000 already-supported device types.
Second-order effects
- Rival smart home platforms must counter with comparable developer economics or risk accessory makers defaulting to SmartThings, which Samsung can bundle through hardware it already ships — TVs, phones, and routers like Connect Home.
Third-order effects
- Platform competition among Samsung, Google, and others pushes the industry toward interoperability standards rather than proprietary silos — a direction confirmed when Samsung later partnered with Google on Matter-compatible onboarding across SmartThings and Google Home.
The trend: Smart home platforms are consolidating around large consumer-electronics ecosystems that court third-party developers, with interoperability standards increasingly set by partnerships among the biggest players.