[azdle]

Because SmartThings was born out of a software consultancy that knew how to do backend cloud services, but not embedded. The v1 hub was just a pic microcontoller that sent raw radio messages up to the cloud for all parsing and processing.

[PaulHoule]

(1) If you are letting people code their own event handlers you wouldn't trust them to run them on a tiny machine like that.

(2) A system like that probably wants to be able to respond to events both inside and outside the house. For instance, turn on your lights remotely with a phone. A cloud component is the reliable way to do that.

(3) At the time I couldn't find decent Zigbee or ZWave hubs other than the SmartThings hub. The cloud dependence is silly, but other than that the hub is great and connects to almost everything. I could go with a Kickstarter hack or try to roll my own but I don't think it would be much better.

[azdle]

> If you are letting people code their own event handlers you wouldn't trust them to run them on a tiny machine like that.

Actually, you can do exactly that now: https://developer-preview.smartthings.com/docs/devices/hub-c... Though that's only for device integrations, so not an exact solution to removing the cloud from the loop on your stuff.

ST is slowly getting away from being totally cloud-centric.