After years of fighting it, Nest will work with Samsung’s SmartThings

Google and Samsung want to work together on smart home compatibility. The two companies put out dueling press releases today, saying that Google Nest devices would work better with Samsung SmartThings, ending a war between the SmartThings community and Nest/Google/Alphabet that has been going on for years. Samsung says that "Google Nest devices, including thermostats, cameras and doorbells, will be "Works With SmartThings" (WWST) certified, allowing users to seamlessly control their smart homes through SmartThings." Nest has long been the most insular smart home company, and now it sounds like Nest devices are finally going to start playing nice with your other smart home devices.

Before Samsung bought it, SmartThings started life as a Kickstarter for a smart home hub. It was designed to be a great unifier of your smart home, and that thought process still mostly survives to this day, even under Samsung. Rather than pick a side in the smart home standards war (Zwave versus Zigbee), SmartThings just packed in both radios, along with Wi-Fi, with an aim to work with everything.

Besides supporting all the radios, SmartThings is also very open on the software side of things. Samsung offers users an IDE that can run custom code on the hub itself or in SmartThings cloud infrastructure. Anyone can write a "SmartApp"—a package that offers custom logic and even custom UI in the SmartThings app—or a "device handler," which lets anyone spin up support for new hardware. Users can load up the SmartThings Web dashboard and install whatever they want and even sync their installs to GitHub repositories for updates. You can also access your SmartThings devices outside of the official SmartThings clients through OAuth, leading to awesome third-party interfaces like the ActionTiles dashboard.