tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
44
I’m enjoying this discussion, but do keep in mind it’s just a thought and discussion exercise. My expertise is in Information Technology, not Business Strategy, and I definitely don’t have any view into SmartThings’s internal management or road-maps in order to make any statements with any authority.
In other words – I’m pulling this out of my .
I’m “suggesting” that we don’t know enough about SmartThings’s Customer satisfaction, market strategy, and Samsung’s influence to know what proportion of influence the active Community Forum members have. Tyler1 (VP of Operations) reported to us that they have a 98% satisfaction rating for their Customer Support services (based on post-case emailed surveys). As per my above disclaimer, I have no qualifications to understand what that number implies about consumer’s opinion of the product overall.
And, I’m hypothesizing, just for the sake of discussion, that the Community couldpossibly be dismissed as an inaccurate representation of the target market; or just a low priority during this particular period of growing pains.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, I am “aware” that I may have as little as 80% reliability with SmartThings, though I’m pretty sure it is higher. This number is coincidentally very significant, since you’ve probably hear of the 80/20 Rule (The Pareto Principle), right?
In this 80/20 proportion, are we, the active Community, the 20% of people that are key market influencers? Or are we the less important 20% “difficult to please market segment” that would take 80% of SmartThings’s ongoing effort that wouldn’t be cost-effective to focus on? Everyone we interact with at SmartThings may, to some extend, believe that latter statement; but I also think that they sincerely believe the this is only a temporary issue until they have sufficient resources to be able to make “everything and everyone” top priority. That is much easier to say than to execute.
I’d like to reassure everyone here that your feedback is always listened to here if not always responded to. I’d also like to poll the group here as to whether fixes from late last week have done anything for you in terms of platform performance - speed and reliability. We are seeing good metrics to this effect but real world experience trumps charts and graphs.
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tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
46
Ben, I was a customer of SmartThings last year (Jan 2014) and had to return my hub and presence sensors after working with your tech support to get them to work reliablibly. I have been monitoring the website and awaiting the V2 hub to see if things have been improving with the reliability of the system.
It is topics like this that make me question if things are improving, or as was noted, it is as usual the ones with problems that are present on the website, the ones that are happy are staying home and having a nice cup of tea.
Anyway, I am still watching and waiting for you to announce word on the V2 hub. Any idea when that will be?
See my original post from 3 days ago. All of the issues have happened with the exception of random garage door opening and lights turning on by themselves. From my vantage point I see no improvement from last week (Feb 20th)
Some of them sort of lose their way but have a lot of good info in them.
As always, attempting to predict delivery dates for tech like this is hard. We want to give everyone a good idea of when they can expect it, but we also want to get it right before we ship. Flaws in hardware cannot be fixed with firmware updates in many cases so it has to be solid. That said, I am pretty confident that we will release in Q2. We are inviting beta testers into the mix as early as the end of this month but do not know the final timeframe.
@Ben, I was having issues with Sunset and Sunrise for about two weeks or so, which started out of no where of me. Since the platform update the other day, both are working fine. I see the entry in the log and my lights react accordingly. So, things seem to be much better for me.
If you could, I would love to know more about the sunset/sunrise issue, why it was occurring, and what the ultimate solution was…and also if this is seen as the long term fix or an interim step to a long term fix.
@Ben, Timing is still way off. I have a third-party ST app that schedules more reliably than any of the ST Hello, Home apps currently do. I have tickets in with support, and they have basically suggested that I try to find answers via the community…
Yes, @Ben, things have improved somewhat since the fixes last week. Hard to put a finger on, but response times have improved, and I haven’t seen any failures of sunrise / sunset, or of scheduled events.
My sunset triggers have all fired correctly for the last couple of days.
Presence triggers, based on either iPhone or the ST presence sensor, continue to be random and unpredictable.
Ran into one latency issue with the ST mobile app in the middle of the day on Friday, which cleared itself in about an hour.
(BTW, I have not historically had more problems with zigbee vs zwave devices except that, not surprisingly and nothing to do with ST, I get some packet loss in an area where I have an old style cordless speaker phone base station and some metal file cabinets. Like I said, it didn’t surprise me and I was able to solve the issue by swapping position of a zigbee and zwave plug-in outlet and adding an additional zigbee repeater on an opposite wall in the next room over. I had to do something similar with a wifi device in the same room before I ever got SMartThings, only in that case I switched from wifi to homeplug for that device.
Anyway, it’s possible, but unlikely, that that’s affecting the zigbee presence indicator from some approach directions, but it shouldn’t affect the iPhone.)
Of course the fixes late last week help… as every fix has in the past. The problem is that in a few days, a few weeks, a month, it will be back to a bunch of stuff not working again. Rinse and repeat.
I was so into this at the beginning. I wrote apps, built an arduino garage door controller, automated all my lights… but I’ve completely stopped. I hit the forums every now and again to see if anything has changed but it’s been a LONG time - eons in tech development world - with the same complaints from 17 month ago (for example, you can search for my sunrise/sunset issues from 2013, or presence issues, etc…)
Once people are paying a subscription, the status quo isn’t going to fly.
For some reason SmartThings has always had sunrise/sunset issues. You can search in the archives for (at least my) issues as far back as Fall 2013. At one point, it was more reliable to write your own app which looked up sunrise/set times on the internet and scheduled events accordingly. However, due to the other usual issues (apps randomly not working, schedules failing to fire, etc.) it wasn’t 100% reliable either.
I think the issue with a lot of these reviews is the same phenomenon that happened to me. You buy the system, you set up a couple of things and you’re so excited about all the possibilities - It’s a whole new world! You go tell your friends, you write online reviews telling the world the the future has arrived, etc.
Then, after living with it a month or two, you start to realize that it’s actually not as promised. You constantly have to poke, fiddle, etc. to keep it operating. Your friends come over, you whip out you phone to show them how you can dim the lights from the couch… oh but wait… well, uh, it usually works, hm… ok well, this is weird. Not to mention the frustration you cause for your family.
Before this I very rarely had issues. In fact, last fall when everyone was having sunset issues I was fine. I actually find our experience to be very good.
To be honest, almost all the issues I have had were related to my mistakes - as in I mis-configured something or I wasn’t thinking through all the possibilities of a scenario.
However, quirks in the UI and some irregularities in how the architecture choices are communicated through it have caused issues with my mistakes.
I really think that ST has two customers, the simple ones and the advanced ones. They need a simple, wizard like interface that steps people through typical scenarios. Then, the user either remains a simple user or decides they want to do more. At that point, they should have the option to pull back the curtain and dive in…with the understanding that it is harder than they might think.
ST has the second half down fine, I think. SmartApps cover all sorts of scenarios and the API will continue to expand and deepen. The part that they are still working on is that front UI For the simple users. I’d be curious to see what the devs could come up with if they were sent away for a week and told to build the UI all over again based on what they learned so far AND (and this is the key point) they were told to ignore any underlying architecture. Basically, build the UI and logic flows first and then build the foundation to do it.
Yep, that’s a backwards way to approach it…but it is actually a good way in this case. Ignore HOW you are going to do it. Just build a perfect world and then work out everything behind the curtain.
I bet they would come up with something pretty good…
I was having a lot of issues with scheduled events not working or running late - all seems well since the last platform update. Everything is running right on time.
I have my fair share of grips ( this being a big one). Support never offered any excuses or blame else where - if nothing else its reassurance that fixes are coming.
I hope a new app design is in the works to go along with hub v2
Unfortunately @garyd9, that is the same experience that IT gets when we call a vendor for support as well. I’d be a rich man if I had a nickel for every time I said “wait…what?” on the phone. I
an39511,
I hear you! It is an example of a company with a product which is not-ready-for-prime-time but selling it anyway and promoting it as if it was reliable technology. I believe the main problem is TS’s insistence on making every action and reaction go through the “cloud”. I previously used a Z-wave hub by Mios which, while not very user friendly, was rock solid in controlling all of the devices in it’s network. It did everything locally. I think I read that TS is looking at that too but still thinks the cloud has to be part of the formula. There may be some role for it but it is not to control devices in my home. I have a motion detector which may or may not work when I enter a room, sometimes taking 5-10 seconds to trigger a light to come on. I find myself standing in a dark room waiting for the event to travel to the cloud and back.
As a home automation integrator I do not see myself recommending or supporting this product in its current form.
IMO ST is running on a shoe string of a budget of AwS nodes that gets over loaded then everyone is affected not sure if they are able to scale to more front end nodes in the cloud but if they don’t to anything the entire platform will come to a complete STOP
I have my hub on an old school timer that power cycle it daily now things seem to have cleared up
I have tried 4 other controllers and they all have issues each on of them
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