SmartThings Tracker? Your Lease Is Up
When you buy hardware with a Cloud dependency, you never own. You're just leasing it for an unknown period of time.
On October 31, a little tracker with a GPS receiver and an LTE-M cellular radio inside stops being useful. Nothing in it breaks. The battery still charges, the board is still fine, the antenna is right where it was. Samsung is just turning off the SmartThings Tracker service, and starting November 1 the app won't show where the tracker is or send a notification when it moves.
This round only hits the version Samsung sold in Korea, the SM-V110, and Samsung says it's a small group of owners it's contacting directly. Galaxy SmartTags aren't affected.
US owners already went through this. Samsung launched the SmartThings Tracker here in September 2018 as an AT&T exclusive, $99 with a year of LTE-M service included and $5 a month after that. You could clip it to a dog's collar and get an alert when the dog got out of the yard, or use it as an arrival sensor to kick off automations when you pulled into the driveway. Samsung discontinued the AT&T model effective October 31, 2021. The device, its data service and the app control all stopped that day. That's about three years. To be fair, Samsung offered US owners a refund or an e-coupon depending on when they bought it, which is more than most companies do.
I don't think "buy" is the right word for most cloud-dependent products. When you lease a car, the contract tells you the day you hand back the keys. With a cloud product, you find out the term when the email shows up.
Sometimes the term is short. Revolv sold a $300 smart home hub with a "Lifetime Subscription." Nest bought Revolv in late 2014 and shut the hubs off in May 2016, about 18 months after the last ones were sold. Lifetime turned out to mean the lifetime Nest decided to give it.
Sometimes it's long. The first Nest Learning Thermostat came out in 2011 and the second gen in 2012. Google cut both out of the Nest and Home apps on October 25, 2025. Credit where it's due, they still run their schedules and you can still turn the ring on the wall. But remote control, Home/Away, voice assistants and the Nest Protect emergency shutoff are gone, and so are security updates. Belkin launched Wemo in 2011 and turned off the app and cloud on January 31, 2026, and unless you'd paired yours with HomeKit, your plugs and switches lost the app and voice control along with it.
And sometimes a promise gets cut short. Neato closed in 2023, and its parent company Vorwerk committed to five years of cloud service for the robots people already owned. Vorwerk shut the Neato cloud down in October 2025, about three years early. The robots still clean if you walk over and press the button. App control, schedules and maps are gone.
Eighteen months, three years, fourteen years. The range is huge, but the ending is the same every time. The hardware is fine. The company decided you'd had enough value out of your purchase, and nobody asked you.
Before you buy the next smart thing, ask what it does the day the company decides your lease is up. If the answer is nothing, you aren't buying a device, you're renting one, and you don't get to see the end date.