Samsung has made its SmartThings platform of smart home devices incredibly powerful over the past few years. Ever since Samsung acquired SmartThings, it has continued to release new devices and software functionality that have only made the platform better. It's now on par, if not better, with some of the best smart home platforms on the market, including Apple.
One that Apple has traditionally been very good at is achieving uniformity of software across its various platforms. You could move from an iPhone to an iPad, MacBook to an Apple Watch throughout the day and not feel that there were bottlenecks in the user experience. The features and interface felt seamless across all of the devices in the ecosystem.
That's one of the reasons why Apple continues to have such an edge over its Android rivals like Samsung. The sort of control it exerts on the entire experience is unique since Apple makes both the hardware and the software. Samsung and other Android manufacturers also have to make do with some of the restrictions placed by Google as well as the limitations of the Android platform.
We've been in this business for long enough to remember when Samsung didn't seem too keen on uniformity. The user interface felt fragmented across its devices so that crucial element of consistency that you could get on an Apple device seemed missing. That became one of the reasons why people would knock on Samsung's devices as it felt like it was trying to be too many things at the same time.
However, in recent years, we've seen Samsung make a major change in this department. It has made noticeable efforts to achieve consistency across all of its devices and bring a sense of uniformity. This has been aligned with Samsung's efforts to make its ecosystem more cohesive and productive. The Galaxy ecosystem has never been as good as it is now and it goes without saying that it will only go from strength to strength now.
Already in its sixth major iteration, One UI was the turning point in this story. It focused on uniformity for the design elements across all of Samsung's devices. Even when the company made the decision to ditch Tizen for Android on its smartwatches, it made sure that future Galaxy Watch models would all have One UI skins. So anyone who bought the first Wear OS model after Tizen got canned didn't have to relearn anything. The interface looked and functioned almost like it did before.
There remained some outliers, though. Even as Samsung handled all of the big picture stuff to project an aura of enhanced uniformity, similar treatment lagged behind for some apps and services. The company would gradually bring them in line with the rest of the ecosystem, but the wait involved would be frustrating, to say the least.
That had been the case with the SmartThings app on Samsung's Tizen-powered TVs. It felt odd that the interface of the SmartThings TV app felt disconnected to the rest of the ecosystem even though it probably should have been prioritized, given that the TV is supposed to function as a central hub of the smart home almost, given that it's the largest screen in the home.
It was hard to not notice the disconnect when moving from the SmartThings app on the phone to the TV. Fortunately, Samsung has finally come through and released the update many of us had been waiting for. SmartThings on Samsung TVs now has a user interface like it does on the company's other devices, bringing much needed consistency to the user interface.
This significantly improves the user experience and makes navigating through the app more intuitive, as users are already familiar with the interface on their mobile devices, so there won't be much of a learning curve there. It also looks much better as there's no longer a jarring visual inconsistency to deal with.
While there remain some loose ends in the ecosystem that still need to be brought in line with the interface across the whole ecosystem, such as Samsung's Family Hub smart refrigerators, it's great to see that the realization exists at the company that having a unified interface is a powerful tool for elevating your ecosystem. This interface on the TV app may be a small step for SmartThings, but it's most definitely a giant leap for the ecosystem as a whole
