Samsung is betting big on the Internet of Things

By 2020, every product Samsung sells will be connected to the Internet of Things—but what’s more interesting is that Samsung intends to make their IoT ecosystem open to developers and third parties. Today’s real news is that by 2020, not only will Samsung products be able to communicate with one another—they’ll be able to communicate with anything.

Samsung is a company that makes nearly everything—smartphones and tablets, smartwatches and TVs, washers and dryers—so it should come as no surprise that it might be interested in helping those products work together. But the scope of Samsung’s investment is massive: for a company with so many moving parts, a unifying Internet of Things strategy is a significant bet.

Last year, the company acquired SmartThings, makers of a fledgling Internet of Things system for kitchen appliances and select smart home products, controlled through an iOS or Android app. Similar to Apple’s HomeKit in iOS 8 and Google’s expanding Nest ecosystem, SmartThings offers hardware and software developers tools to make their connected products share data and talk to sensors.

But Samsung isn’t content with toasters that chat with coffeemakers. Samsung’s vision extends to every object in your life, from the speakers on your bookshelf to the chair you’re sitting in. When every product is powered by a low-power microchip and can communicate with some form of proximity networking, your very rooms can become smarter and offer new experiences.

Samsung envisions a world where literally any device can talk to any other device. Whereas competitors might strive for an integrated system of first-party hardware talking to first-party accessories across first-party channels, Samsung takes a different approach. Its emphasis on openness—to other smartphone platforms, to third-party home automation hardware, to other IoT ecosystems—opens up a wealth of possibilities to developers.

Third-party app makers across platforms will soon be able to build apps that integrate with Samsung’s Internet of Things, automatically connecting to all of the company’s watches and televisions and smart ovens. But the platform’s openness implies that HomeKit-oriented products or Nest-branded products won’t be left out of the loop, and that users can jump from one brand to another as they choose. Just as websites display the same content regardless of your device’s manufacturer, so too will Samsung’s Internet of Things be device- and platform-agnostic.

For now, Samsung is leaning on SmartThings for the heavy lifting. The platform works as a bridge between platforms, translating instructions from various smart home ecosystems so that users can control any of them simultaneously. The service is only beginning to be absorbed into Samsung’s product family, and a more tight integration is doubtless coming. (“S Home” has a ring to it.)

Some challenges of course remain: just because a microwave is technically capable of communicating with a flowerpot doesn’t mean it has reason to. The technological groundwork for a true connected home will be laid by solutions like Samsung’s Internet of Things, but its usefulness will emerge from the applications that third parties build.