Android 2.3.5 - Release Notes

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?

Massive battery drain on me and my wife’s phone as well post this update. One phone with android 5.0, while other with 7.0.
smartthings tops the battery drain on both phones now, post this update.

I have put smartthings app on greenify now.

Please fix or revert asap.

Keeps on crashing and locking up my s6+ and s7. At the very least they should test on phones made by their parent company.

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Options…
https://www.google.com/search?q=smartthings+apk+history&oq=smartthings+apk+history

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Yup, I had to go back to v2.3.1 even though it’s buggy at least I can use it compared to the junk released with 2.3.5 and now 2.3.6.

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Anybody know is there a way to revert back to a previous version when you have iOS?

Not sure if this is accurate…

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Was this supposed to stay behind closed doors and remain within the circle of trust so it’s hush hush to the general SmartThings customer?

I don’t know the policy that was required of Beta participants for this App release, but it is not uncommon for some companies to require Beta testers to agree to a NDA.

  1. During the Beta, certain features (or even security vulnerabilities) may be revealed that are deferred until future versions.

  2. A company may wish to hide some of the “sausage making”, so to speak… Whether good or bad development and testing processes.

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I know Terry. I was only sharing information between the 2 threads and sharing my opinion of what I saw. Don’t wanna see anyone tossed under the bus so letting it rest now. Can always have an offline convo.

Thanks

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(Yup, I understand.)

Software is hard; so it is interesting to see the sausage making, actually; especially as a product manager myself. I run a continuous beta, and I know exactly which of our “known bugs” we decide to let through production… And exactly how often production issues aren’t discovered in beta.

So SmartThings’s releases are… educational.

I second that!

Sorting order on iOS looks unchanged so it looks like it’s and android issue.

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Add me to the list of people whose battery life took a huge hit with this new release. I reverted back to previous version until that’s sorted out.