Transform Your Living Space Into a Smart Home Using the SmartThings Ecosystem

Convenient framing, especially since SamMobile has just published an exclusive showing the app behind that "incredibly easy" experience is about to get its first real overhaul in years.

Marketing vs. the actual state of the app

The Samsung newsroom piece walks readers through five steps to turn a regular home into a SmartThings home, leaning on the latest hardware lineup — an upgraded Hub, new sensors, and what Samsung calls "an improved app." That word "improved" is doing heavy lifting. SmartThings has been the odd One UI app out, skipping the design refresh that hit nearly every other Samsung system app with One UI 8.0 and 8.5. If the current build counts as improved, the bar has been on the floor.

What's actually shipping

According to SamMobile's early look, the next SmartThings update aligns the app with the One UI 9.0 design language, and it's more than a reskin. The bottom navigation swaps to a pill-shaped floating tab bar with five sections: Home, Devices, Life, Routines, and Menu.

The Home tab is where the real changes land. The background becomes dynamic — a live wallpaper that shifts with the time of day, cycling through morning, daytime, evening, and night palettes. Nine preloaded wallpapers ship out of the box, plus the option to pull a custom image from your gallery or camera, and each location (home, parents' place, a rental) gets its own wallpaper. A SmartThings Now card sits at the top of the Home screen, surfacing features you haven't touched yet — toggleable, for those who'd rather not be upsold on routines they didn't ask for.

Widgets come in three flavors this time: Device Control, Screen Device Control, and Routines. The Life tab consolidates Clothing Care, Energy, Food, Home Care, and Music Sync into rearrangeable cards. Routines splits into Discover — what other users automate — and My Routines. Samsung hasn't locked in a release date; the redesign is expected to land after the stable One UI 9.0 rollout reaches eligible Galaxy phones.

What this means for existing setups

For anyone running Routines, webhooks, or third-party integrations through SmartThings, the visual layer is largely irrelevant — your automations won't break on a redesign. What matters is whether Samsung uses this overhaul to finally surface the developer-facing controls that have been buried for years, or whether the new tab structure is just a prettier shell over the same logic gates.

Meanwhile, XDA is making a complementary argument: that old tablet collecting dust in your drawer is the smart home dashboard you've been putting off buying. Paired with the SmartThings redesign and its new widget set, that's actually a coherent build. Mount the tablet, pin the Device Control and Routines widgets, and you've got a fixed wall controller without dropping cash on dedicated hardware.

The five-step promise gets easier to swallow once the app underneath stops fighting you.