Samsung's SmartThings Now rebuilds the Home tab

Samsung has rebuilt the front of its SmartThings app around a feature it calls SmartThings Now. The update reshapes the Home tab of the connected living platform, which Samsung says now has 470 million registered users and support for more than 430 Works with SmartThings partner brands.

What SmartThings Now does

SmartThings Now sits at the top of the Home tab as a stack of cards, building on the Home Insight work Samsung has been shipping through 2026. Instead of waiting for you to hunt for a device or launch a routine, it tries to put the next useful action in front of you. If a Family Care member, such as an older parent, stops generating device activity for an extended period, their caregiver sees a card offering a check-in or a call. Arrive near a home location saved in the app and SmartThings Now suggests switching on lights and air purifiers ahead of you, then offers to turn that one-off tap into a routine.

A tidier Home tab

The Home tab itself has been reorganised into dashboards, device cards and service cards, with the service cards redrawn to fit more onto a single screen. SmartThings Now also examines the past week of activity to recommend changes to your Favourites, so a card for an air conditioner can recede as cooler weather arrives and an AirDresser card can take its place. A Routine Insight card shows how your routines have been firing and lets you delete the ones you no longer want, while a Live Wallpaper shifts through the day and a Floating Bar keeps frequently used controls within reach.

Local control when the internet is not there

Alongside the redesign, Samsung is adding local control. When a phone and a SmartThings hub are on the same Wi-Fi network, the phone can talk to the hub directly rather than routing commands through the cloud. Samsung puts the gain at roughly 30 per cent faster responses than cloud-based control, and says the app switches between local and cloud control automatically depending on whether you are at home or away. A rebuilt Offline Device Diagnostics page can push fresh network details to every registered device at once, which matters when a router change knocks a house full of gadgets offline.

Our opinion

Smart home apps spent a decade being filing cabinets: everything is in there, and you still have to remember where. SmartThings Now is Samsung betting that the harder problem is deciding what to show you, not storing it. The Family Care card is the interesting part of that bet. A platform noticing that an older relative has gone quiet, and offering their caregiver a phone call rather than a graph, is a genuinely human use of telemetry, and it is the sort of feature households will either find reassuring or faintly sinister depending on how well Samsung explains it. The local control work is the quieter win. A smart home that keeps obeying when the broadband drops is worth more than another animated wallpaper.

Jaeyeon Jung, executive vice president and head of the SmartThings team in Samsung's AI Platform Center, said the update marks another step in moving beyond a home experience where users search for and launch features, and towards delivering relevant information and controls at the right time.