A fight is brewing over control of the smart home and APIs are the weapon of choice.

In the land rush to get their connected devices into consumer homes, device makers are pushing design, convenience and new features for their point products like locks, thermostats and cameras while home hub companies are on building one app to control everything. This is causing some tension between players, and may even end up frustrating consumers.

Last week SmartThings said it had integrated the Dropcam IP camera into its home hub setup. This allows people who have SmartThings hubs to control their Dropcam and view footage from the SmartThings app. It also lets certain events from SmartThings sensors trigger the camera. For folks who want to tweak their home setups and who have many connected devices, such a hack is convenient.

But Greg Duffy, the CEO of Dropcam, said it’s not secure. He said he can’t do anything to stop SmartThings from letting folks tie their Dropcam account to SmartThings, but he worries that it’s not secure.

“They are storing Dropcam users’ user names and passwords,” Duffy said. “I can’t vouch for that.” A SmartThings spokeswoman said that all passwords stored by SmartThings are encrypted using 256-bit AES encryption, and that the company takes security very seriously.

Greg Duffy, CEO, DropCam Mobilize 2013 (c) 2013 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Dropcam does have a closed API, which means it doesn’t let other companies integrate Dropcam into their products without building some unsupported workaround, be it SmartThings, Revolv, services like IFTTT or others. This is in part because camera data is sensitive and Dropcam wants to protect consumer data and privacy, Duffy explained, but it’s also because he doesn’t think there is a huge demand from a wide swath of the consumer market for integration with smart home hubs. He said the problem of having to open multiple apps just to control your home is not a real one for most people, who still seem content to get their camera feeds from Dropcam, control their speakers with Sonos and set their thermostats via Nest.

And when the consumer seems more ready, Duffy confessed that Dropcam has some ideas about connected products that could integrate with its cameras in a way the average consumer would likely buy into. In the meantime, he’s not advertising the SmartThings integration to Dropcam customers.

Hacked support is just what the customer ordered?

Dropcam isn’t the only company facing this issue. Nest, as the most visible connected product success, has seen companies from Revolv to Insteon offer to control of the Nest thermostat through their home hubs. Ha Thai, who handles communications for Nest’s developer program, confirmed, for example, that Insteon’s recent support for the Nest thermostat isn’t official. Nest intends to “make APIs available to developers shortly, which will be the tested and documented way for third parties like Insteon to access Nest products and services,” Thai wrote in an email.