Any release notes on today’s update?
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Hey Beckwith!
There was an update — although everything we updated was on it’s backend and structural for optimization. So there isn’t much notable on the release notes side…
On top of the optimizations April mentioned there were several crashes that were fixed.
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Any timeline on when the improperly designed notification model will be addressed? I’m referring to the polluting of the status bar with multiple icons for every notification that comes through - and not clearing the notification(s) when the app is opened from one.
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Hey Scott,
So there is a lot more to the notification system then one would think. I had the same view point until I started at SmartThings. Honestly we agree that there is some improvement but there are a few hurdles to get over. There has been tons of discussion over this and right now we have landed on just serving all notifications. Here are some the struggles we debate on:
- Security notifications
- If we nest all notifications we run the risk of drowning out a security notification among other (maybe less important) notifications
- We can try to separate them out by priority but that takes a lot more heavy lifting then one might think. Like requiring a user to set a priority level for each notification they receive. It starts to get messy really quick.
- Now that Android has deep linking within apps how do we make that experience as awesome as possible.
- Since we have many different areas that can display information in the mobile app we can have the notification display that appropriate screen with that info when you tap on it. If we nest notifications this isn’t possible anymore.
It is something that we are truly trying to investigate and make sure we get right. Sure we could flick a switch and nest all notifications but what kind of user experience does that provide? If we change the way we serve notifications we want to make sure we get it right.
Hope this helps give you some insight into why we haven’t just “pulled the trigger” so to speak.
Thanks for the feedback. Keep it coming 
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Another challenge is multiple locations. Do you have a nest of notifications per location? A nest per type of notification per location? A nest per room per type of notification per location?
Challenges aside, this is one of my most hoped for improvements to our Android app.
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Whatever was changed seems to have fixed the issue I was having with the Nest device type crashing when I check the activity log.
Thank you!
Fine, you asked for it.
The fact is that NO Android application handles notifications this way. Almost daily I find myself manually swiping 15 or 50 SmartThings notifications away from my notifications sheet if there is a single notification from another app I want to have remain. That is just absolutely CRAZY.
Multiply this across 4 devices here (because you have yet to implement notification syncing on Android), and you have a quagmire of epic proportion that is a very serious usability issue. Do you honestly care that little about the user experience? Preferring to just sit back and wait months or years until someone dreams up some ‘pie in the sky’ overthought, prioritized notification solution! We all have the capability of sending a text message for real emergencies, only I will never see it in the status bar OR on active display because of all the needless noise your present notification implementation creates.
I see this as such an inconvenience that I consider daily turning the whole bloody mess off and going to text messages. Is that the solution you prefer I use to not be inconvenienced multiple times daily?!
One that is superior to what you have now. Waiting for you guys to completely overthink this is the worst possible option.
Oh… and seeing NOTHING in my status bar but SmartThings icons addresses that? Hardly.
Your a small outfit that should still be nimble at this point; get it done!. How about start by surveying your entire Android user base to see what they want now; and not umpteen months from now. If there were laws against improper use of Android Interface guidelines you guys would all be going to jail!
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Oh… and BTW, Android users have a number of third party apps available to them to take additional action based on the content of a notification, so you really don’t have to reinvent the wheel for all of us (Maybe you do on iOS but not Android). So just shut off the confounded noise!
Appreciate the feedback Scott
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The update is the preparatory update for hub v2 as seen in this video! When you go to add a new hub, the setup video shows the new hub! This makes me happy!
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