A few years ago Europe went from analog to full digital over-the-air TV broadcasting. It was a necessary evil that forced millions of people to buy a decoder or replace their TVs.
Cell phones get obsoleted by carriers turning off support for older cell phone technologies.
It’s a fact of life… I mean… technology.
Anyway, this hurts me just as it hurts everyone else even though I routinely update all technology to avoid extreme obsolescence where possible. I am just trying to make the point that while ST’s change management could have been better, they did support the old infrastructure and devices for quite a long time. It is indeed time for change so as they say: “Out with the old, in with the new.”
I don’t believe your comparison to periodically replacing your car with a newer model is a reasonable analogy to what SmartThings users are going through now .
Now if you were to say that every few years EVERY owner of your make of car would get a notice that the car co. was working on a replacement model which might come out in about a year or so give or take a few months, AND IN THE MEANTIME EVERY CAR OF YOUR MAKE AND MODEL on the road would no longer be able to make left turns nor could it be put in reverse, and every few days the interior and exterior lights would go off and the car would suddenly stall while cruising down the highway at the legal speed, requiring you to pull over and make numerous attempts at various adjustments in order to restart it, AND that a new version of your car, which may or may not restore some or all of these functions, will not be available for purchase for perhaps a year while you drive with these limitations, then perhaps you would have created an analogy to what SmartThings users are going through now.
The new ST app is pushing me to leave SmartThings. The new Alexa Skill doesn’t work half the time. The Alexa App doesn’t always see when contact sensors are opened or closed. And the new ST app keeps removing my ActionTiles Smart App. I go into Smart Apps to authorize a new device under ActionTiles, and half way through, I get a message saying “there was a problem with your network” (which there was not), finish authorizing the new device, and the new ST app REMOVES ActionTiles all together.
If something is NOT ready to be rolled out to the public, DON’T ROLL IT OUT!!!
The best analogy I know is mobile phones. Both android and iPhone users have run into situations in the last 10 years where there was an announcement with only a few months notice that An existing model would simply no longer work for some features. Or, for example, in the case of 2G models, work at all.
Very annoying, but it does happen.
In my case, I made the decision back in 2015 to shift from thinking about home automation as being like home improvements (plumbing and dumb electrical fixtures) and think of it more like mobile phones, with a typical three-year replacement cycle.
So I now budget my time and money on the assumption that anything I buy, including the hub, may have to be replaced in three years. Either because it’s been made obsolete by the company or because there are other features that I want to have that aren’t offered on my existing platform. (This worked out to a cost for my home similar to what I budget for a mobile phone and service.)
If something does last longer than three years, all the better: it gives me extra money in the budget for shiny new stuff. But if I end up having to replace it, or I just want to replace it, I still stay on budget. And I don’t have to spend a lot of time and energy worrying about futureproofing. Or agonizing too much when I have to leave something behind.
I know that’s not a strategy that will work for everyone, and I am in no way Excusing the way this particular Sunset has been handled (particularly after all the promises that classic wouldn’t go away until the new V3 app had all the equivalent functionality). I’m just saying my life has been easier since I stopped assuming that this was a hard goods purchase, like a car or even a television and rather looked at it as a service with hardware, like a mobile phone.
That’s the point - the “old” is being smothered to death while there is not yet any replacement “new.”
There is no new Hub available to purchase, and the new software fails to enable the existing hub to continue to properly function for its existing owners.
This is not how obsolescence is normally carried out!
These are both examples of industry wide changes and not company changes. If Verizon in particular said they were eliminating 2G, but the rest of the industry did not, I would be feeling the same as I do about the way Samsung has handled this. The 2 G deprecation is actually more than a few months notice by the way. It was superseded in 1998. So, they retained backwards compatibility for almost than 20 years and the protocol was initiated almost a decade before that.
I get your point, but there isn’t good example that justifies or rationalizes what is going on here because, as you said, we were promised all the functionality before the classic app was turned off.
I would agree that a three year cycle is a good plan. But that should not be based on version protocols. That should be device lifespan. (Which could also be longer. But, that is pretty common in the quality realm of late…)
I don’t believe anyone reasonably believes their devices should work indefinitely on newer and newer equipment. But I do think it is reasonable to expect backwards compatibility of the system to handle older equipment longer than three years. (The industry does have several other options… and that is how I voted with my $$)
An even better analogy might be if Verizon decided to shutdown all their cell towers and just force all their customer’s phones to use WiFi calling. They could say the new system covers 95% of the existing usage of their users and is more modern and more supportable, while getting rid of the legacy back-end systems that support those cell towers.
@jody.albritton Hello, i bought my hub v3 about 7 days ago. I picked out my DH’s and ordered some stuff to play arround with. I told my wife that i was sending it back after reading the first 20 posts. My hub told me i could connect almost everything…
I just spend allot of time reading everything (347 comments) to find out what is replacing the community support for “almost everything”. And the information is scarce to put it mildly.
@RBoy Aqara stuff, shelly switches Wiz camera maybe. And cloud to cloud is not where I got smartthings for. And the reason is not neccesarily that those things are cheap but I appreciate the functionality of those things. The most importend of these is actually the shelly switches since they are build in and i would like to to run them locally.
Do the Aqara things work for you without device handlers? And i see the shelly cloud to cloud link in the app, but i dont think they work without hooking them up to the shelly service first. I searched for it on the forums and all i could find was people complaining about the fact that the connection keeps dropping due to the whole cloud thing.
Yeah so thats the whole point. Allot of stuff needs device handlers and its great that people can create and share them. For some reason i am still confident in sticking with SmartThings, but becasue there is barely any information on what is replacing the whole community driven support for allot of things i dont really want to invest in my soon to be smarthome to find out i need to switch platform because half of my stuff is not compatible anymore with my hub.
Which aqara devices are you referencing, specifically? I have a bunch of the temp/humidity sensors and just use the smart sense temp and humidity DTH, so they all run locally.
I was thinking about motion sensors and door/window sensors. We are getting a bit offtopic but dont these things need there specific DH or can they use a general one as you mentioned above for temp/humidity sensors.
today alexa no longer controls my devices, looked in app and turns out some moron removed alexa smartapp. had to google and found this thread and also this:
" Some features in the SmartThings Classic app will no longer be available including the following:
Creating new Routines in SmartThings Classic
Editing or viewing old Routines in SmartThings Classic
Adding, viewing, or managing Lock Code Manager in SmartThings Classic
Adding, viewing, or managing Smart Home Monitor in SmartThings Classic"
so it means cannot create/edit routines also in new app?
smartthings becaomes just a garbage.
will make sure not purchase anything from amazon and samsung ever again:
" We will be discontinuing the SmartThings Classic app on October 14 ."
