For years, the smart home has felt a bit like a high school cafeteria. You’ve got the Apple HomeKit crowd at one table, the Google Home crew at another, and the Samsung SmartThings folks holding down their own corner. If you dared to mix and match—say, you have an iPhone but love your Samsung smart fridge and robot vacuum—getting them to talk to each other was… complicated.

Well, the walls of that digital cafeteria are starting to come down. In a move that’s a huge win for anyone living in a “mixed-tech” household, Samsung just rolled out a massive update to its SmartThings app for iOS. The headlining feature, announced this past Monday, is the one we’ve been waiting for: you can now use Siri to run your SmartThings routines.

That’s right. Your iPhone can finally tell your Samsung TV what to do, and it won’t even feel weird.

Let’s be real, opening an app to turn on a light feels like a chore. The whole point of a smart home is automation and ease, and voice is king.

This update bridges the gap by plugging directly into Siri Shortcuts. If you’re not familiar, Siri Shortcuts is Apple’s automation feature that lets you trigger a string of actions with a simple custom phrase. Samsung has now built a bridge so that a “SmartThings Routine” can be one of those actions.

Imagine you’ve set up a “Good morning” routine in your SmartThings app. This single routine might tell your SmartThings-compatible blinds to open, your Samsung coffee maker to start brewing, and your smart lights to fade on.

Before this update, you’d have to open the SmartThings app to run it. Now, you just say, “Hey Siri, good morning,” and your entire Samsung-powered morning routine kicks into gear. You can do this from your iPhone, your HomePod, or even your Apple Watch.

It’s the same for any other routine you build:

• “Hey Siri, movie time” could dim your lights and turn on your Samsung TV.
• “Hey Siri, leaving home” could trigger a routine that locks your door, turns off all the lights, and starts the robot vacuum.

Setting it up is pretty straightforward. You don’t even need to dig into Apple’s complex Shortcuts app. According to Samsung, you just go to the “Routines” tab within the SmartThings app, tap the three-dot menu on the routine you want, and select “Add to Siri.” From there, you just record the custom voice command you want to use.

While Siri support is the star of the show, Samsung didn’t stop there. The entire SmartThings experience on Apple devices just got a serious quality-of-life boost.

1. An Apple Watch app that’s actually useful
The SmartThings app for Apple Watch has, until now, been a bit limited. This new update completely overhauls it. You can now see a full list of all your registered devices and device groups right on your wrist. More importantly, you can send commands and—you guessed it—carry out your routines directly from the watch. This is perfect for when you’re on the couch and want to run that “movie time” routine without fishing your phone out of your pocket.

2. Live Activities for your lock screen
If you have an iPhone with the Dynamic Island or just use your lock screen, you’ll appreciate this. The SmartThings app now gives you the ability to view and control up to five of your most recently used devices using Live Activities. This means if you just turned on the air purifier or the living room lamp, a little widget will live on your lock screen for a while, giving you a quick-access button to control it without even unlocking your phone.

This isn’t full, native Apple HomeKit integration. You’re still not going to see your Samsung washing machine pop up in the Apple “Home” app. Let’s get that out of the way.

But what this is, is a massive, practical acknowledgment from Samsung that millions of its customers use iPhones. Instead of trying to force users into their own ecosystem, Samsung is building bridges to make life easier for the people who buy their products.

For anyone who has an iPhone but has invested in SmartThings-compatible devices (which includes a huge range of brands beyond just Samsung), this update removes the biggest point of friction. It makes the whole system feel more cohesive and, well, smarter.