Samsung has finally pushed their much rumored Family Hub update for all Family Hub refrigerators second gen and later and it’s a big update…or so they say. I’ll let you know if I can ever find any release notes or information about Family Hub software anywhere reliable. Seriously, try to find any kind of actual release notes or even a full list of feature changes.
If you feel like there’s about to be a long list of gripes, you’re right!!! Lets get into it then, shall we?
To start, think about the last time you bought a refrigerator. It’s likely that it was more than five years ago. It’s also likely that you spent less than $6,000 (the original release price of Family Hub refrigerators). Now imagine the company that manufactured your refrigerator tells the world that everyone but you is getting a set of great new features. This is the danger of buying a refrigerator with a built in operating system. Although given the complaints I have below, if you’re one of the people who bought a first gen Family Hub, you may be the lucky one. Also I cant understand why Samsung doesn’t promote the ability to swap out the one door with the screen in it for an identical second generation door. This seems doable.
The biggest update to the Family Hub in the 6.0 release is the addition of Alexa. In my review of the Family Hub refrigerator I dedicated a section to complaining about what a disaster Bixby is, so this is a huge addition. Kind of. Alexa runs infinitely faster than Bixby on the Family Hub. Conversations are much smoother, and more often than not she understands you, just like a real Echo. But even with the best addition to the refrigerator, there are some big drawbacks. Alexa is installed as a seemingly standalone system. So yes, you get all the great features Alexa has to offer, but they’re segmented out from the refrigerator. Ask Alexa to play something on Amazon Music, and she’ll dutifully play it for you, but if you want to then manage what Amazon Music is playing using the Family Hub Amazon Music widget, no dice. Because your music is playing through Alexa and not through the actual Family Hub, so the widget has no idea what’s going on. The same goes for opening apps by voice. Alexa doesn’t know if its running on a refrigerator, a clock, a microwave, etc. So that functionality doesn’t exist yet. Only Bixby has that power today (womp womp).
Next up are themed boards and larger customizable widgets. Themed boards, or board as far as I can find, consists of a single board called “Cooking” which takes up an entire home screen and cannot be removed or changed. It’s largely just a big annoying widget that promotes recipes not based on the food in your fridge, and tries to get you to shop through it. Thus far, it is a major annoyance and the only person in the house who likes it is my 3 year old because he can reach some of the links that make other pages open. I highly recommend moving this page to be the last page you swipe through instead of being the first page after the home board. The larger customizable widgets are nice enough. We only have a use for the Weather widget at this time, but if you’re an Instacart customer, for instance, you’ll love the half screen widget you can now enable.
Another major addition is a tighter integration with Google Nest. You can now access your Nest devices directly through your Family Hub provided you’ve linked them with SmartThings.
Speaking of SmartThings, I hope you like SmartThings because it’s taking over the Family Hub! The Family Hub phone app is being deprecated in favor of the SmartThings app. While Samsung promises that you will have access to more features on the SmartThings app, like access to the Meal Planner, that release has not been pushed yet and there is no announced date for the update at this time. If there are multiple people in your household who have SmartThings accounts for one reason or another, be prepared to combine accounts. Only one SmartThings account can be paired to the Family Hub at a time, and logging in with another account will summarily remove the previous account. This is probably because Samsung has eliminated multiple user profiles with this version of the Family Hub software.
With this release Samsung had the opportunity to update their apps, and I was very hopeful they would address some of the concerns I mentioned in my review. Unfortunately, in true Samsung fashion, they’ve done the opposite. For instance, in the case of the Meal Planner, my wife’s most used app, they’ve forced you to create a Whisk account and will only let you add meals from the Whisk app. It’s basically turned this into an unusable app. This seems to be the case across the board, as Samsung tries to force adoption of their own ecosystem rather than let people use this more as the Android powered tablet that it is. As for third party apps, we’re all in luck! Although Samsung has been removing apps for the past few revisions (six apps gone this time, including Uber), with this release they provided a single brand new app. The Perdue app. (pause for effect) If you’ve ever longed for an app dedicated to chicken, you’re the big winner of the Family Hub 6.0 update.
I also mentioned earlier that finding information about Family Hub releases or feature lists is difficult. It’s also difficult to find a dedicated forum or blog for this product. This is concerning. The Family Hub has been around with virtually no competition for 5 years and that fact that neither Samsung, nor the smart home community has fostered a following for this product tells me that something is wrong here. After buying a whole house full of new appliances last year, I can tell you that in the mid and high end appliance world, it is difficult to find any non-smart appliances these days. Given the Family Hub’s tenure, the fact that nearly no other manufacturers make a competitor to it, and the potential to be the flagship smart appliance but is not leads me to believe that Samsung has little to no confidence in this product or that their vision just plain sucks.
The Family Hub OS, which was already a crippled version of Android, has only gotten more restrictive with each release. The noticeable lack of useful third party apps just gets worse as Samsung only seems to add useless ones, while removing twice as many equally useless apps. The push to force the adoption of SmartThings is concerning as they sunset the SmartThings hub and rumors abound that they could theoretically make SmartThings a subscription service. In all honesty, the day someone figures out a path to root this and sideload a full Android OS I’ll happily do it and gain infinitely more functionality out of the Family Hub OS.
If you’re stuck like I am with the new Family Hub 6.0 here is the official Samsung forum to scream into the void and get little to no response or help for your efforts.
I wish i had come across this kind of a post a bit earlier, I bought a Samsung Family hub fridge older version late June and It’s crap to know that we can’t update even a browser on our own… the bixby is totally useless and it is a white elephant really…