This is an interesting question and I’m not sure just how many people are actually asking it. So I decided to explore just how nest and SmartThings interact, and if they are or not or not compatible.
For those who are in a rush, I’ve provided you with a short paragraph basically nailing the answer below. But I’d recommend reading the entire article because I found a few workarounds that will allow you to use Nest with SmartThings. With very little effort.
Does Nest Hello Work With Smartthings? The short answer is no, Nest does not work with smartthings. This is because Nest has a notoriously closed API. This is for good reason as Nest products such as smart doorbells need to be highly secure.
It turns out there are a few solutions that will work for Nestan, SmartThings and a whole host of other products that weren’t originally designed to work with each other. So keep reading and I’ll teach you exactly how you can interact. Smart things with nest and more…
What Is Samsung Smartthings?
It seems like nowadays every major tech company wants to produce their own integrated smart home solution. Samsung is no different in this matter. Their particular volley is with a product called Smart things. Open till recently SmartThings was more of a standard that connected various Samsung devices together.
Although recently I believe they are bringing out a Bixby home product which is specifically designed to integrate all of the SmartThings products.
And when you start examining it, Samsung in particular has a much stronger case for creating an integrated way to make their apps work well together. That’s because their product range is way more vast than say Google or Apple or Amazon for that matter.
Not only is Samsung famous for making televisions and smart phones. But it also makes pretty much anything else you can think of. Laptops, ovens, microelectronics for apple’s iPhone! It’s got them all. So if you can create a standard that lets you control them, then you can start making Samsung a much more appealing brand to those looking to make an integrated smart home.
However, what happens if you want to integrate SmartThings Samsung’s standard with an competitors brand? In this case, nest?
What Is Nest?
Nest is a company that offers smart devices. Those devices include things like Smart DoorBells, security cameras, thermostats and smoke detectors.
They’ve grown in popularity over the years. So much so that Google recently acquired them to be part of their suite of companies. Now you can find nest under the Google website umbrella.
Nest is a great solution if you already have a bunch of Google home products in your house. It’s designed to seamlessly integrate with them. That’s because they’re both owned by Google.
But what happens when you want to integrate a nest product with Samsung’s SmartThings? Can they work together? Well, as we addressed in the introduction to this article, the short answer is no, not really. They don’t work well together. This is a real problem with the industry in that most of the larger companies are leaning towards ecosphere locked in. This means that you are not encouraged to buy products from competing brands and instead they make it very difficult for you to want to buy a variety of products from a variety of brands.
Apple is a great example of this in that they make their products work so well together that it becomes less of an appealing prospect to buy a competing product. You’re much more likely to just buy the same product or equivalent product in Apple’s lineup. For instance, iPhone owners are more likely to buy iPads.
So with this in mind, is there any hope of integrating these two products?
The answer is sort of. With a few caveats.
IFTTT to the Rescue?
Ifttt emerged as a potential solution to the continuing direction of a lot of the major tech companies to want you to be locked into their particular ecosphere of products.
This particular service aims to make products that don’t necessarily work well together work together. That’s pretty cool if you ask me. And it also means that even non smart home solutions to products can be integrated in ways that you’ve never thought of before.
For instance, you can set up Uber so that when your car arrives at your home, the Philips Hue Lights in your house start to flicker to let you know that the Uber has arrived. This is something that neither company originally envisaged, but through the use of ifttt. You can make this and many other things happen.
So with this in mind, there are currently the ability to control Nest devices through SmartThings using IFTTT as a middleman.
Here’s a link to the nest and SmartThings supported actions currently available on Ifttt.
Will this integration last forever? Well, that’s a difficult one to answer. Companies are under no obligation to continue to support IFTTT. And could drop it at any point in the future. So it might be the case that you’re relying on something using IFTTT and then a few months or years down the line. It might just suddenly stop working and there’s very little you can do. So there’s an element of risk going down this route.
For instance, Google could drop support at any moment, and there’s not much you could do about it. So in a sense, this solution is more for tech enthusiasts than it would be for your regular member of the public. Since they had expected to go wrong every now and again.
But That being said, if you can get it to work then it’s very easy and why not?
This will be the way I would recommend to get nestan small things talking together.
Here’s some smartthings compatible doorbells
It turns out SmartThings has quite a lot of support for quite a few brands.
With the exception of Nest. SmartThings covers some pretty major players, such as Arlo, Ring and Eufy.
So that begs the question, if these major players are available for smart things, why would you choose nest in the first place? Unless you’ve already purchased a bunch of nest devices, I would recommend just going for one of the competitive products that has SmartThings compatibility.
Conclusion
Okay, that’s it for now. Using some creative work arounds you can get Nest to play well with SmartThings. But unlike a lot of the other competitor brands, Google for whatever reason has decided to make these two products not work well together.
In all likelihood, it’s because Google wants a monopoly on this particular technology and doesn’t want to encourage you to use other products.
That being said, there’s lots of alternatives to the products that nest offers, and if you are set on going down the Samsung SmartThings route then I would suggest purchasing one of those instead, such as Arlo or Ring or Eufy.
I’ll list a couple of those products below in case you’re interested in buying them
f you are interested in learning more about home security, then we have a bunch of articles on houshia that cover more topics of nest and other products. Check them out in our home security section.
P.S.
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Steve
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