Setting up your smart home can take a lot of effort. But once you get things running smoothly, you might not need to touch them for a long time. It can run automatically in the background using automations and could self-adjust to your schedule as it learns it better. There might be an occasion where you need to go into an individual device app or into your smart home hub app to control something, but it’s often not necessary if your home is working well.
You don’t even need to go into it if your Wi-Fi goes down if you have Thread devices set up. But, this doesn’t mean that you might not want to control your smart home differently. Some people like to use voice commands to tell their smart devices what to do. Others prefer to quickly open up an app. Samsung SmartThings gives you many options, including a unique one that helps you understand where in your house an issue might be.
SmartThings is an intuitive app
You can control all of your devices from here
Despite mostly using Amazon Alexa in my home, I do rely on the Samsung SmartThings app for three of my smart home devices. I have a smart washer, dryer, and Frame TV that are all from Samsung and use SmartThings for smart setup.
The SmartThings app is super simple to use either on my phone or on my Frame TV. I get more information from the phone app, but the TV app will show me what devices I have and what they are currently doing.
Because I have more than one device that uses the Samsung SmartThings platform, there are multiple views I can choose to display what I have in the app. There is List View, which, as seen above, just lists out the devices that you have in your home and lets you pick them from a number of cards. It’s straightforward and not intimidating, giving you easy access to click into your devices.
This might be ideal for someone with a lot of devices in their home that fall into the SmartThings category. If you don’t have many devices, it makes sense to just deal with them when they are listed in the app.
However, if you have a lot of devices in one room, it can be hard to differentiate in the list. Plus, you might want to highlight one specific room and deal with all the devices within it. That’s where Map View can come in.
Map View gives you a layout of your home
You can customize it to perfection
Whether you’re looking on your TV or your phone’s SmartThings app, you can toggle between List View or Map View. Map View allows you to look at your SmartThings-enabled devices like you are going to encounter them in real life: in whatever room you have them in.
You can upload a photo of your home’s floor plan to give the app the full experience of what your home is like. That way, you can actually place the items in the specific sections that they’re in in that room. For example, you might have a Samsung TV on one wall, plugged into a Samsung smart plug and across from a SmartThings-enabled humidifier. You can show all of them in Map View and just tap a few icons to isolate what you’re looking for.
The fact that Map View is a 2D or 3D rendering of your home (depending on which view you want) gives you the ultimate control. You can decide how you want to interact with these devices by choosing them through the layout of the house.
Just by looking at the map, you can see the connection status of each of the devices. This helps you in a pinch if a voice command isn’t working for one of the devices, so you can check to see whether it’s listed as working in the room and whether other devices in that room are down as well.
On the floor plan itself, you can just tap on one of the devices to turn it on or off. You don’t have to click into it and go through settings to adjust the power.
More filters of what Map View can do
There’s even more this can handle
You can open your Map View on your phone and use it on your TV, tablet, and computer, thanks to the cross access.
I love being able to click into the laundry room portion of Map View and see which machine has finished its cycle. I also love being able to see which of my devices is using the most energy each month.
There are different filters you can apply to your Map View that not only show how much energy it is currently using, but how your home’s energy is doing on the whole for the month. This helps you target what you might want to do to address rising costs. My personal favorite is to use energy monitoring smart plugs.
There are other category filters that you can choose between, helping you customize your experience any time you’re using the app. You can look at what is using up the most energy, what is running the longest, what the air quality is in each room, and what the temperature is set to.
Being able to design your own home can also help you use the SmartThings app as a planner of sorts. You can visualize what smart devices would look like in the room, letting you do some designing and, honestly, shopping. Map View can help you see what your home could aspire to be.
Map View gives you complete control of your home’s layout
As if SmartThings wasn’t easy enough to use, you can look at your devices in Map View. This provides an interactive layout with multiple filters. You can check out how your devices are currently doing and what you might need to fix. The more devices you put into your SmartThings app, the better Map View is.