One of the coolest new features in Android 11 is the ability to use the power menu to host multiple shortcuts for your smart home devices. There was no sign, however, that Samsung adopted this feature in its approach to updating, but after all it did. Samsung has smart home controls on Android 11; they just changed the location.
On Android 11 in Pixels and some other devices (OnePlus, Oppo, etc.), accessing the power menu shows much more than just lock and shutdown buttons. There’s a brand new UI that shows your active cards on Google Pay, as well as smart home controls. This is one of the best user-oriented features in this release, but unfortunately Google has made it optional for its partners to adopt. In the early versions of Samsung on Android 11, we were disappointed to see that smart home controls were nowhere to be found.
Fortunately, Samsung have adopted smart home controls on Android 11, the company decided to change the location. Instead of being in the power menu (which is more difficult to access in One UI anyway, because Samsung still thinks Bixby is a good thing), Samsung has put Android 11 smart home controls under the ” devices “that appears in the notification and quick settings tab.
Touching this button opens SmartThings by default, but a menu allows you to switch to Google Home. From there, a floating menu allows you to manage the applications that can appear in this menu and customize the layout as you see fit.
The other small change that Samsung has made is that these buttons are no longer one-touch actions to turn devices on and off. Instead, they pull the “slices” where you’ll have to tap again to switch the power. A little tedious if you ask me, but even better than looking for the app.
However, there is one highly unfortunate thing about it. This change applies only to a UI 3.1 which, at the moment, is restricted only to the Galaxy S21 series and also to the Galaxy Tab S7. Other Samsung devices on Android 11, like the Galaxy Z Fold 2, were brought only to One UI 3.0, leaving smart home controls out and the “devices” button restricted to SmartThings as it has been for years. A pity, but at least there is hope for future updates.
thanks Max!
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