Google Home and Samsung SmartThings will use Matter to share control of your smart home

Ben Schoon | Oct 12 2022 - 1:12 pm PT

The smart home is set to be reinvented over the next few years largely thanks to the arrival of the Matter standard. Ahead of that fully launching, Samsung and Google have announced a partnership that will deepen how SmartThings and the Google Home app can work together.

Announced as a part of the Samsung Developer Conference today, Samsung announced that it has partnered with Google to improve integration between the Google Home app and the SmartThings app. Under the Matter standard, these two smart home apps aimed primarily at Android users will be able to share control of your smart home devices automatically.

Where SmartThings and Google Home can currently integrate with a lot of the same devices and services, it requires manual setup for both apps. If you want to add Philips Hue to Home and SmartThings, for instance, you’ll need to link accounts twice.

“In the coming weeks,” Google Home and SmartThings will introduce a multi-admin feature that will eliminate this requirement for users of the two apps. If a Matter device is set up in one app, it will be a one-click option to add it to the other. The process isn’t fully automatic, as users can choose whether or not to add the device to each respective smart home app.

Samsung explains:

When users go into the SmartThings app, they will be made aware of Matter devices that have been set up with Google Home and will be given a choice to easily onboard those devices to SmartThings, and vice-versa. Now, whether users want to control their smart home on their SmartThings app or a Google Nest Hub, the devices will always be there. Users won’t have to manually add each of their devices one at a time or worry about which ecosystem their device has been set up on first.

Matter is coming together for a launch sometime later this year. Earlier this month, the Connectivity Standards Alliance announced the Matter 1.0 spec, and Google confirmed coming updates to better support Matter devices with its Google Nest ecosystem of speakers and smart displays.