200 Device Limitation? Really? Any alternatives?

This is too funny!

I often had to go to alexa.amazon.com to delete all the devices instead of picking through the duplicates, etc. because the app itself is terrifyingly bad. You have to open each item to see if it is live or not, you have to scroll back to where you were (and it is lots of flicks in my case) because it always takes you all the way back up, and the list could go on. I think the Amazon app needs a lot of work to improve the Smart Home section, and I haven’t seen much, if any, progress in a long time.

Edit: I did not mean disrespect for Robert Parker, but I do hope he doesn’t replicate what Amazon is doing over at ST… at least not the poorly designed stuff.

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Robert Parker is the one that left the SmartThings position…

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Ah, ok, then whomever from Amazon joing ST. :slight_smile:

Same person :joy: he left Amazon, joined smartthings several years ago and has since left smartthings.

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Any update on correcting the 200 device limit on Android?

If you have a Samsung Android device there is a work around from the personal devices section. Otherwise I’m told it will be addressed in the next release.

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I had raised a ticket with SmartThings and I got the following reply yesterday.

“Right now, there is a 200 device per Location limit. There is also a 10 Location per Account limit and a 20 Room per Location limit. These limits are intended to be practical limits that prevent a single account from becoming too large for the Apps and platform to effectively manage and present. This Device limit is enforced on Android specifically, but there is a bug on the iOS version that prevented the limits from being enforced. The next App Update for Android should change the limit, which is why the iOS version was not updated to prevent this. This App Update should begin rolling out within the next week or so.”

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Yet none of those limits appear on the appropriate page in the documentation. The Location limit of 10 is mentioned in passing in introductory comments elsewhere in the documentation but is 50 on the page referenced above. The other two are not mentioned at all, from what I can see. Would I be being too cynical in thinking that they seem to be more to do with managing app performance in the case of devices, and cosmetics in the case of rooms (on my Devices tab there isn’t room for any more dots across the bottom)?

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I came across this limit yesterday… My son and I were stumped, shocked even… We are still porting over a hundred plus devices from an old controller. Most have been migrated, but I still have some smoke sensors, a doorbell, some sirens, and quite a few flood/water sensors to migrate and yet I came across the 200 limit… I was aghast at the realisation that to get to that two-hundred, Smartthings added all of my 4-gang (MCOHome) switches as 4 devices, same with the 2-gang, numerous virtual devices, my TV and 2 mobile devices. It’s absurd. My network still behaves decently bar for some likely cloud-induced lag and some lag that I have pinned down to my clunky MCOHome switches, other than that it’s mostly fine. It’s mostly the mobile app that takes like somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds to load up with th status of all devices, and as has been said many times, I am sure that is bad design in th first place.

I found this topic and employed the initial workaround, which allowed me to add a further 6 devices or perhaps endpoints), and then that stopped working as well, so that’s been blocked. And I don’t have any iOS devices on hand. It’s tragic and frankly, pushing me towards starting to consider Home Assistant (if they have a decent alternative to webCoRE - something I still need to research). I mean, between this 200-limit, and the shutting down of Groovy which is expected to kill off WebCoRE, much of the Smartthings attraction is fading.

Anyway, it’s been 4 days since Smartthings replied to @PradeepJose, so I guess I’ll sit tight for a couple of weeks and see how that part pans out if a new mobile app for Android is rolled out.

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So the “personal devices” work around no longer works too?

Would second hub solve this problem by adding another 200 devices? Although it’d be expensive solution :thinking:

no, it’s a mobile app limitation, not hub limitation.

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The limitation is per Location, so it would have to be a second hub in a separate SmartThings Location.

Actually, having said that, I hope that is true. All bets are off with the app on occasions.

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I only have 60 devices so far but I can see having 200+ and if second hub won’t help then only thing is to look for alternatives. Too early for me to trow in the towel though.

It does actually, checked it out on my son’s tablet - I do not have a Samsung device and that “Personal Devices” option only shows up on Samsung devices, actually. Which means we can now only use that one device from our household to add devices.

And to be frank, now I am getting skeptical about Smartthings fixing this. Blake Arnold above - on 2nd Dec 2020, said:

And yet, here we are, almost 11 months later. Instead of correcting it, they plugged a hole they found in the app so that the previous workaround stopped working. So despite what they told @PradeepJose , I am half expecting them to instead plug the Personal Devices “hole” to ensure every little loophole is firmly plugged.

Or maybe after 10 months working on Smarthings, I, too, have become a little cynical. Let’s hope it’s just that.

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Hi again…

And here I am today, with my son’s Android mobile app version number “Version 1.7.73.22”, and I am getting the error of the 200 device limit… We are at 218 devices (using Smartthings’s ridiculous method and counting child and virtual devices, as well as ancillary devices such as TVs and mobile phones. So basically, it seems that of this version number (Version 1.7.73.22), Samsung have actually removed/patched this workaround.

This would be even more utterly ridiculous given what Samsung told @PradeepJose above, i.e.:

Frankly - that could mean anything, maybe they will be reducing the limit, though that’d be some rather creepy trickery from them. However, in any case, I feel rather cheated now, and it seems like the next update (based on their recent frequency) is going to be about 3 weeks down the line. But to be honest, I am not expecting anything better. Meanwhile, the silence from Smartthings is deafening on this matter.

I still have at least 29 Z-Wave devices to add to the network, one of which is multi-endpoint (so 4 devices) - and that’s a quick mental count, sure I’ve missed a couple. So I guess, in a way, Smartthings are telling me what to do - and that is move away.

i had over 300 devices originally, but the hub tanked a couple of times with the zwave radio was acting up. now I have couple of hubs, each on its separate account with under 100 devices and so far everything is good. I mainly monitor the first hub, but I have it set up such that if another hub alarms it will trigger a sensor on the first hub.

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You’re right - given the constraints, what you did seems sensible. However, of the 218 devices I mentioned, exactly 100 are Zwave devices… The rest are child devices (I have several multi-relay switches in my network, and the app is counting each of those as 4 devices, when in reality it is only one device with 4 relays). There are also a number of virtual switches I use for scenes or in webCoRE. As well as a TV and a couple of mobile phones. No Zigbee devices at all.

So it seems to me that the zwave radio really should be able to handle this much - indeed, most of the time it works (if you discount the occasional cloud-induced lag or Smartrhings incidents). It would have sufficed if they gave a disclaimer every time I added a device that I am over the 200 limit and that it may cause problems or performance issues, but a hard block seems over the top. I could do what you did, but there is so much intelligence now built into the system, and so much inter-linking between devices, that it would make it a nightmare (and still not the ideal scenario in the end), and from where I stand, the size of the nightmare seems pretty comparable to moving to a different solution and at least having a more ideal scenario in the end.

In any case - I will wait for a few weeks and see. My future of remaining on ST depends on this limit and on how many devices I might have to throw away as ST moves towards Edge.

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The 200 device limit on Android has been removed :tada: No app update required.

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