Time to Retire Your V1 or Nvidia Shield Link Hub
Samsung SmartThings announced today it will be dropping support for the original V1 SmartThings hub and the SmartThings Link for NVIDIA SHIELD. If you are still using these hubs, they will stop working later this year on June 30, 2021. The move comes as SmartThings continues to evolve its platform and retire legacy apps and services. If you use one of these devices, Samsung will email you a user-specific discount code to purchase the new Aeotec Smart Home Hub, which works as a SmartThings Hub.
The retirement of these hubs shouldn’t come as a surprise. We actually speculated back in June of last year that they would be retired as part of the platform migration. The V1 hub is now 7+ years old, which is an eternity in the smart home industry. The SmartThings Link for NVIDIA SHIELD had a shorter lifespan at 3 years, but it is now 15 firmware versions behind the V2 and V3 hub. The good news is that Samsung is giving 3 months’ notice and a decent discount on a new hub. The bad news is that SmartThings still doesn’t have a migration utility for these older hubs. You will want to give yourself plenty of time to reset/exclude your Z-wave and Zigbee devices, add them to your new hub, and re-build any automation logic.
These SmartThings hubs will stop working in June 2021. Left: V1 hub. Right: SmartThings Link for NVIDIA SHIELD.
Which hub should you move to?
Now the big question: which hub should you migrate to? SmartThings continues to offer a good balance of ease-of-use, automation power, and brand compatibility. They also have some nice features like more local automation planned for the future. But the migration to the new platform will most likely continue through at least the end of 2021, so you may encounter some instability as that continues to progress. Another option is the Hubitat C-7 hub. A lot of SmartThings users will find the technical details of it familiar, and it offers fully local automation for your Z-wave, Zigbee, and some WiFi devices. But its app isn’t quite as polished and has a slightly steeper learning curve.
If you have one of the hubs being retired, what do you plan to do? Let us know in the comments or via Twitter.
