I just read through every message on this trail begun by @iHavequestions. Brutal stuff, and it makes me feel terrible. But I really appreciate the direct and passionate feedback.
There is so much that I could say here, but perhaps better to just strike up a dialogue and answer specific questions. A few things to get started:
- I know it feels like we’ve been way too quiet on the roadmap, and I agree with you. It’s a function of the whirlwind we’ve been in since last Spring from funding to acquisition to ramp up planning. The silence will end starting next week at CES, and I do think you’ll be excited about what we are doing. I will make an effort to be as transparent as possible in the roadmap going forward.
- We are plowing forward with SmartThings in a huge way, so have no worries or misconceptions about us getting blended into Samsung as a talent acquisition or something like that. We have a very extensive roadmap and essentially unlimited investment capital that we are now pouring into all elements of the SmartThings experience and products.
- Things at the core platform level were unstable at a deeply unacceptable level to us throughout the summer and up until November when we performed the major platform architecture upgrade. At a cloud level, things have been much more stable since then. We felt every ounce of your pain and are in a better place now with some continuous improvements planned. We monitor all platform health metrics in real-time, with visibility across the entire company.
- Adding to the trouble along the way was the continued acceleration of activity on the platform. Every key metric has more than doubled since August. We’ve now got an architecture in place that we believe can handle the growth going forward.
- The biggest inherent problems we see tend to be with local integrations where the underlying device’s APIs are unstable. Wemo and Sonos have both been trouble. Sonos will get better soon when they release a formal API at last. I will look into Hue, but my Hue’s work well talking directly to my SmartThings Hub without the Hue bridge in the middle. Generally speaking, mesh networked devices on Zigbee or Z-wave work best today.
- Another source of frequent trouble is breakdown in basic network health in Z-wave device networks. They aren’t self-healing when a device stops responding properly, and we don’t handle the degradation smoothly. The manifestation of this is often seen as hiccups or delays in switches turning on or off or the like when a command gets stuck waiting for a response from a given device. A manually initiated Z-wave network repair (from the mobile app or web interface) often helps a lot. In the next six months I expect we will add much better utilities to flag when these problems are happening and even initiate network repairs automatically in the background. We are also working on next gen networking technologies that will be inherently better (e.g. Zigbee -> Thread, etc.).
- Another inherent challenge has been our cloud-centric architecture to-date. While it is super powerful and flexible, it causes latency and hiccups at times if there is any degradation of the connection and so many steps are needed for basic actions (e.g. door open event goes to cloud, subscribed SmartApp fires, sends command to turn on light down to hub which relays it to light switch, which then sends ack back to hub and through to cloud). We will make a big announcement next week directly related to this, and are moving to a hybrid architecture that will address it soon while retaining all the power and flexibility.
- I will personally look into the issues cited with the IDE and was not aware there. We have hired a direct report to me to lead the development of all of our developer tools (vs. a partial focus area for our product management team) who starts in January, so direct visibility on all issues related to the IDE will be clearer going forwards.
- None of the above are excuses for usability challenges in our mobile apps, from speed of loading which goes down as you add lots of locations and devices, to general ease of use. We’re proud of what we’ve done and lots of people love it, but we see many ways it could be much better and are exploring a range of options from a number of incremental improvements to a full UX overhaul. I and we would love to hear from you directly about what improvements would help you the most.
- Another challenge has been organizational as we’ve grown from a team of 7 founders to 50 to 100 and now growing even more rapidly. We are organizing ourselves to take advantage of our greater scale now so that each of the most important focus areas has a fully dedicated team versus task switching that happens constantly in a smaller org. This structural change will result in a better, more consistent and predictable flow of product improvements in the areas that matter most to you.
I hope the above points are helpful. Above all else, know that we are listening, care tremendously, and are committed to making both incremental as well as break through improvements along the journey together with you. Great things take time, but I’m confident we will get there. Thank you for all your patience and support and passion along the way!
-Alex