I would have to respectfully disagree that it is always a local problem. There have been many problems confirmed by SmartThings support that were caused solely on the cloud side. Most of them don’t affect every customer every time, but as one charitable healthcare foundation says “it’s only rare until it happens to you.”
Although for whatever reason many problems never make it to the official status page, enough do that you can see that there are stability issues.
http://status.smartthings.com
And if you take a look at the first bug report page in the community – created wiki, none of the problems there were on the customer side.
http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=Bug:_First_Reports
If the system is working to your satisfaction, that’s great and I’m happy for you. But I would not dismiss the concerns of other people.
I personally have a strong technical background (I previously worked for IBM as a network engineer and had worked with both Zigbee and zwave before ever buying SmartThings) but I am now quadriparetic, and have to pay someone else to do any maintenance on the system, even reset a battery. So I’m very aware of the amount of maintenance that SmartThings requires.
Often times the glitches are temporary, or there are workarounds, but that doesn’t change the fact that at present this is a fairly high maintenance system.
It’s an Extremely versatile and flexible system, but there are still a lot of instability issues.
The company is very aware of it and since April has made improved reliability their top priority, and I do believe that they mean that. But they just aren’t quite there yet.
Just in the last month there have been at least four platform changes that have broken things for customers. They were often able to get a fix the same day, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t broken.
About a month ago they changed something in the stock Z wave switch handler so that some light switches changed so that on was off and off was on. Without the customer making any changes at all. That had nothing to do with the local network.
Again, if it’s working well for you, I’m very glad to hear it, and I hope eventually will all be able to say that.
For right now, someone who wants a “set and forget” system may find that other alternatives are a better match. Someone who has the technical ability to do the occasional tinkering required will probably find SmartThings is a much more exciting and versatile system than the competition at the same price point. So there’s no one Best system, it just depends on your own needs and preferences.
Submitted with respect.