Android 2.3.5 - Release Notes

Nougat here, GS8 SmartThings is not is my top battery users…

This is after a restart. Look at the images in my posts above. 90% battery, now look below, 81% battery… That’s just in 30 minutes of doing nothing but having the ST open in between crashes.

EDIT: Look above at the video above and notice the battery % - now it’s at 72%, and while writing this, I’m down to 69% while just keeping the ST app open.

Not to make light of anyone’s frustrations, but between this thread and IOS, you have to admit that it’s kind of comical. This all coming on the heals of the firmware upgrade. Another firmware upgrade next month. Make it a SmartThings Trifecta!

Same here, no issues.

2.3.6 just released and it ain’t no better!

Tagging @slagle

@Brad_ST posted this on the iOS thread…

iOS 2.3.5 - Release Notes - #56 by Brad_ST

I can’t get my SmartApps up in either Android or iOS, this is stupid…

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Almost dito issues with my iPhone 7+… no crashing but couldn’t make it to noon today before battery alarm went off.

I think the icon graphics are rendering differently in the device handler but not all icons? And the text is inconsistent between platforms, the iOS is barely readable and the Android is large. I have a custom device handler where across iOS is displaying them properly but Android went totally wonky after the update.

= = = iPhone7+ iOS screen capture on left = = = = = = = = Android Screen on right

I’m seeing the same rendering issues on Android. What a POS release…

Horrible update. Text alignment was OK for me on 2.3.5 on my galaxy s6. Now it’s either way to big or does not display at all. Thermostat tile is completely broken, does not display all the fields.

I knew they would make things worse and f… something else up with their 2.3.6 fix, so that’s why I turned the auto update off.

Thinking this is the turning point to where customers are going to go elsewhere. They didn’t learn from the firmware upgrade disaster and they didn’t listen to their beta testers earlier in the week who had reported on all of the same issues in IOS yet they released it to the public anyway. As for Android they are blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other either.

More BS to come from staff later I’m sure to cover up the incompetence of this company.

And yet we will have all these community members thanking all of them for fixing the ongoing problems, lol!

I’m done. This product is so much more of a chore than being able to enjoy or rely on it. And although they tout security as one of their biggest features, they specifically tell you in disclaimers that they are not responsible and tell you not to rely on all these features. What a disaster. Time for the smart home hub to change.

Different things work for different people.

As far as this being the “turning point,” again, different people have different levels of tolerance. There were major outages in November 2015 and again in March/April 2016 and September 2016 and each time some people posted that this would be a turning point, but there are still many community members here who experienced those events. And as far as we can tell, total account numbers have continued to grow over that time.

Every system has pluses and minuses. And different companies have different development philosophies.

SmartThings is very flexible and versatile for a system at its price point. But it also has reliability and stability issues that have been going on for at least a year and a half, and maybe longer.

There are other systems that are much more stable, but also offer many fewer features.

Each person has to decide for themselves whether the system they currently have is providing enough value to justify the time and money required in maintenance and “Plan B” workarounds for glitches. There is customer flow in pretty much all directions for systems in this price range.

People who don’t want to deal with maintenance hassles and are willing to pay monthly fees can move over to ADT pulse or Xfinity home. Each of those has well over 1 million customers, many times more then SmartThings. But at the same time there are people who get tired of monthly fees and want a wider Choice of devices and more sophisticated rules engines, and they may be leaving a paid monthly service and moving to SmartThings or Vera or Homeseer.

So make whatever decision feels best to you based on your own time and money budget and the amount of unpredictability you’re willing to put up with. And the company design philosophy regarding the release of new features which best matches your own.

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Everyone’s got an opinion right? Just to offer a differing one…

The bugs in the app updates have been nothing more than minor inconveniences on my side. I’m not expecting perfection, and I can’t remember the last time I was actually frustrated by any of this stuff, much less looking for an alternative (if there even is one that checks all the boxes on my wish list). When there are real problems the ST team seems to be fairly quick about issuing hotfixes. This is still a niche market IMO, DIY home automation (I am drawing a line between DIY and professionally installed and monitored systems) hasn’t hit the mainstream yet where companies are willing and/or able to throw massive amounts of resources around to make a foolproof product. Just my opinion, worth what you paid for it… :wink:

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In the long run, they don’t survive. you might see it as resiliance (time after time), but I just see it as a larger customer base that they will lose. Since I have been here, and the mistakes I have seen, successful companies learn from these mistakes and don’t repeat the same 2 months later. Just because a company has more customers 3 years later, doesn’t mean they are successful, it just means that it’s a larger customer base they are going to lose to another customer that learns and builds from this unfortunate division of Samsung.

Now as far as a home to consolidate all of these devices into, I could care less about the $99 investment for the piece of crap hub that tries to support these devices. It’s the time invested with so many issues and on a weekly basis having to repair this, disable this, remove this, re enable this and that’s when they aren’t f…ing around with firmware or the mobile app.

Hindsight is 20/20 and you are right. You get what you pay for. For $99, lol it’s going to do about what $99 worth can do. Lesson learned for me.

Now for the $60 and $70 that I paid for each of my Hue and LIFX bulbs and the $220 for each of my Yale locks, that was money well spent!

Sorry - the app they just released to the public had all sorts of issues from the beta testers and they released it anyway. However you want to justify that or classify the tolerance or patience of the customer, that’s just flat out incompetent for a company to do and have the customer deal with, knowing that these same issues were reported before releasing!

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Read the IOS thread. This was all reported before the release. That’s my problem with this company, not so much the cheap $99 hub.

This fiasco with all these customers could have been avoided or limited if they had held off on releasing to the public and addressed the same issues reported in beta! That’s my issue with ST. Second time in 2 months!

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Not that there is a 2.3.6 release thread yet, but I have 2.3.6 on BOTH my tablet & phone & this is what I get:

The new automatic sorting feature for ENUM inputs has completely destroyed the usability of all my DTHs.

Please put them back the way they were so that the developer has control over the order the items are displayed.

If you’re going to mess with ENUM inputs, how about fix the multi select option that multiple users reported broken 6+ months ago.

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I’ve been having real battery issues for the last couple of days too and after checking it seems to be the Smartthings App that’s the biggest culprit.

Battery fully charged at 8am this morning, down to 15% by 2pm so charged the phone back to 100%, then after 1hr49min I’m already back down to 76% with the biggest use being the SmartThings app which I haven’t opened in the foreground, so is background use only. Phone estimates I’ve only got 4h20min of battery remaining which is terrible!!

I’ve had the phone for about 7 months and never had the battery last less than a working day - until now.

Phone Details - LG G5 / Android 7.0

In the time its taken to type this post the SmartThings app battery usage is now on 8% with everything else still on a max of 3%…

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Isn’t the SmartThings Beta Program confidential / non-disclosure?

How do folks here know (or tell) what problems existed in Beta?