I love my smartthings setup. I have had it for a few years and i love the functionality it offers and the variety of devices it works with. unfortunately I hate that the service seems to go down very regularly in the past few months. I am also worried about the new app as it doesn’t seem to be getting any positive reviews.
Give the poor reliability lately, I am just starting to look around to see what other alternatives are out there. does anyone have any recommendations for another platform that allows for custom programming and a good deal of control over devices without being overly complex to setup and manage?
not saying I am going to switch - I am just curious.
also - I am currently using a first generation ST hub. would updating my hub to the new one help with reliability at all? IU am guessing not since the reliability issues are with their service and not their hardware.
I just got SmartThings last month to augment my ADT Pulse system (the ADT+SmartThings didn’t exist yet when I got Pulse last year).
Then our first outage hit last night. At least I have smart switches for the lights so I can turn things on/off.
And the ADT commands still worked through Alexa.
I did not know about the monthly outages when I bought into ST. My plan was to rely on it more and take out ADT when my contract ran out. Now, we’ll see.
Since I just bought ST, I’m reluctant to throw more money at replacing it. But Hubitat looks like a step in the right direction, a z-wave/zigbee hub that handles things locally.
Totally, but as mentioned in those other threads, understand what you’re buying if you go for it anytime soon.
There is no mobile app and no way to access the system remotely. You’ll have to locally program all your automations using Rule Machine, a scripting program that was originally released for ST by a community developer (now one of the principals at hubitat).
That’ll probably change at some point, but for now that’s how that system works.
ST has turned into such a MESS that it is unusable.
And support does not even care to respond.
I have had no working devices since March 16, 2018.
NO RESPONSE FROM SUPPORT TO DATE.
If you play your cards right, maybe you can alienate that user community too by making unreasonable demands and generally disrespecting other people with your posts.
First, ST has not turned into a Mess and is in fact very usable even with the hiccups lately. Sorry to hear about your troubles.
As for Hubitat, yep I moved on board with them about 2 weeks ago give or take a few days. Browser based setup, all local processing and its pretty fast. There are some things I really love about it, in fact a lot of things I do and its worked fine except for a few hiccups with one or two devices (Yes no matter what you use its going to happen)
There is No mobile device app yet so if your wanting that your out of luck at least for now, you will have to deal with SMS notifications which are limited or use another SMS program to handle those for now.
I for now reverted back to ST only because I need the mobile app for the wife so she can adjust lights and stuff via the app and the goodness that comes with that for those things
For now its running in the house with a few device on it to play with things but for the most part very very happy with it.
I spent days setting up ST, and now I’m going to have to spend more days setting up something else because I refuse to let Samsung harvest all my information. The Samsung Connect app has no right to demand access to all my information so I can switch on my kitchen lights. It’s totally invasive, unnecessary, and offensive. I haven’t seen support address this properly in any threads. I will have to switch to something like Hubitat now.
This makes me furious because my ST setup was optimized. There is no practical reason for me to have to switch other than Samsung’s coercive business policies.
For a few months I have been contemplating switching to something else. Dt is UNSTABLE, at times unusable. Month old problems continue to remain. Even after weekly Tuesday software promises. I have had it. Obviously they are not well funded. Very obvious that they are requiring us to do there troubleshooting and debugg for them. How can you promise fixes that don’t FIX? How can you push the debugg on users? How can you mandate users to de-program there dumb things to fix the problem when in fact, it does not resolve the problem? How can you expect users to de-program there system when it is a huge time investment. Yes I signed up for a diy system. But I did not sign up for diy system that becomes unstable due to your dumb things software updates. If I could load a back up file for hardware and programming. Then yes I would do it. Otherwise I will not be your trouble shooting monkey. Unless you pay me $200.00/hr to be your Test monkey.
In the hunt for a more stable/reliable system. I will be happy when it comes. My heart cringes on setting everything up from scratch. Hopefully the new system is more savy in set up/programming. Well thought out.
Dumb things has turned into such a rickety mickey mouse fisher price paper weight…
Management should be fired. Management should be embarrassed. Plastic crap…
Not to throw fuel on the fire, but I for one have been very pleased with ST. I have about 100 devices. Have been using ST for about 2 years now after trying 2 other systems that just didn’t cut it.
My devices are a hodgepodge of different brands as I buy what goes on sale. With a couple minor exceptions they all paired up quickly. and those that didn’t I was able to make work with very little work.
I have a few of my own smartapps and quite a few custom DTH’s and smartapps by others.
I have integration with Harmony and Alexa. It all works fine. I use ActionTiles and am well pleased with the interface. Makes things very easy for the wife to use.
When I got the notice to migrate to Samsung login it went flawlessly. Took about 5 minutes. A couple weeks later my wife got the notice and it also went flawlessly.
Do I have the occasional hiccup, of course. Sometimes things are a little delayed or it takes a second try. But that doesn’t happen very often and sometimes can be attributed to my own mistake. And I have had devices that went bad, but they are not ST branded so can’t blame ST for that.
I know others have problems and I’m not trying to minimize that and I sympathize, but just wanted to point out that not all of us are unhappy.
