Samsung's SmartThings will support Google Nest devices starting in January 2021
Support for Nest products through the SmartThings app arrives next month — Google and Samsung are bringing their smart home platforms together for the first time. Samsung's SmartThings …
Context & Ripple Effects
SmartThings has spent years as a closed-ish hub: Samsung acquired it, refreshed the SmartThings Hub with a subscription monitoring service in 2015, and added voice control via Amazon's Echo that same year. Nest support is the first time a Google-owned device line lands inside a rival's smart home app.
The January 2021 integration reads, in hindsight, as the opening move of a broader interoperability arc: it set up the [[a:983782|2022 expanded Google partnership letting Galaxy users onboard Matter-compatible devices into both SmartThings and Google Home]], and presaged the Home Connectivity Alliance work where LG and Samsung apps will control each other's appliances and TVs in 2024.
First-order effects
- Nest owners gain a second control surface: thermostats, cameras, and other Nest hardware become manageable through the SmartThings app alongside Samsung's own device ecosystem.
Second-order effects
- Google and Samsung convert former walled-garden friction into a joint front against Amazon's Echo ecosystem, which had already pulled SmartThings voice integration back in 2015.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds across the corpus: pairwise integrations (Samsung-Google, then LG-Samsung) normalize cross-vendor control and push the smart home toward standards-based interop like Matter rather than per-platform lock-in.
The trend: Smart home platforms are trading exclusivity for interoperability, with each vendor-to-vendor integration lowering the wall the next one has to climb.