SmartThings is one of the world’s top IoT and home automation platforms, and Samsung is improving it every year with new feature additions. Over the past few months, Samsung has launched SmartThings Find and SmartThings Energy to the platform. Now, the company has announced SmartThings Edge for faster and more reliable home automation.

SmartThings Edge is a new hub architecture that allows the core functionality of smart home products to be executed on the local network rather than depending on cloud processing. This makes experiences faster, more reliable, and more secure. The company says that users might not see changes in the front-end, but the back-end will get notably faster in terms of connectivity and experience.

This new feature eliminates the need for cloud-based processing, which means that a lot of processes can be accomplished locally on a SmartThings Hub. Users can also add devices LAN-based, Zigbee, and Z-Wave devices. SmartThings Edge is compatible with version 2 and version 3 SmartThings Hubs and on newer hubs that are sold by Aotec. The company is also bringing support for Matter, an open-source smart home platform that is also backed by Amazon, Apple, and Google.

Samsung is slowly moving away from the legacy Groovy platform and modernizing a lot of its core components. Developers can now build device drivers with Lua to offer a more robust and simpler way for integrating smart home products into SmartThings. The company says that it is committed to improving SmartThings to build more meaningful experiences.