Killing an alarm panel? My email states that in 90 days, my ADT Smarthub Alarm will STOP FUNCTIONING, sensors, everything, even locally, it won’t even continue to work locally. Over $700 invested in what they touted was a serious home security system to “protect what matters to me.”, and in 90 days it will be a brick. And, as a solution, they offer I buy a new Blue ADT hub from them, the very company that just promised to leave my home and family unprotected 90 days from now. Can anyone say “class action”? It’s certainly immoral, has to be illegal.
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Unfortunately, this issue has been litigated many times in US courts and it all comes down to the terms of service.
The smartthings terms of service, which you agreed to when you set up your smartthings account, says they can discontinue anything at any time for any reason. I know most people don’t read the fine print, but it is in there.
Will SmartThings ever change the Services?
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We’re always trying to improve the Services, so they may change over time. We may suspend or discontinue any part of the Services, or we may introduce new features or impose limits on certain features or restrict access to parts or all of the Services. In some cases, the changes we make to the Services may cause older hardware devices, third party services, software configurations or setups to no longer work with the Services, and you may be required to upgrade or change these devices, services, configurations or setups in order to continue using the Services. We’ll try to give you notice when we make a material change to the Services that would adversely affect you, but this isn’t always practical.
They have a separate issue with warranties, which is why they are offering a “full or partial“ refund for panels which are still in the warranty period. But again, this kind of issue has come up many times before, and at least in the US, a legal case unfortunately won’t get you anywhere.
See the current discussion thread for more about the “retirement.“
I find it hard to believe that a judge or jury wouldn’t consider this egregious, regardless of any fine print, considering how they marketed this product, it’s equivalent to ransomware, but with hardware. Never buying another Samsung product again, or ADT for that matter. We aren’t talking about some app that stops working, it’s hardware that they are remotely killing, even though ( in the case of my ADT alarm panel) it runs 100% locally, save the app interface to arm, disarm and notifications. 90 days to spend them money on a proper alarm or leave my family unprotected at a dangerous time. Again, if it isn’t illegal, it’s clearly immoral.
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I agree on the morality, and I’m not saying I agree with the judges, but there have been multiple systems in the past that did the same thing, and no court case that I am aware of has ever succeeded. This includes Nest Revolv, Spectrum Security, Lowe’s Iris, and Staples Connect, among others.
If you want to treat a security/home automation system as a sunk cost, then you need to buy one that runs without the cloud, and then it will last as long as the hardware lasts. Or you need to buy one with a guaranteed term of service, which smartthings does not offer.
Absent that, this can happen, and with most companies that can happen at any time, because most have a similar terms of service.
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That’s definitely true on the SmartThings platform. Not so much on other platforms.
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Never got the discount code via email. Yes, I checked my spam folder. I guess there is 2 hours left for “by March 1st” before another missed promise.
Any updates on the Google Assistant integration and being able to select which devices are available in the Home app? When I checked the app, the only option in the Google integration is to “Delete account”. I really want to eliminate duplicate devices and hide those that are not needed (individual shades, when I have groups in one room).
The official answer for the last 5~6 months has been that “ST is working on it, but it is slow because it requires extensive changes.” Check out the Amazon Alexa threads where it is much more commonly discussed, as both “New” voice assistant integrations removed the ability to select which devices are shared.
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Does anyone actually know the date when the Groovy IDE cops it in the neck?
Has it had it’s last cigarette yet?
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No one knows. We only know it has an Estimated Departure later this year
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The only advantages smartthings offers over hubitat are the ui (some people don’t like the new app though), camera/doorbell support, and the abundance of cloud to cloud integrations from various manufacturers. Depending on your use case, some of these may be important, or not.
That being said, I don’t understand why companies insist on building things to be cloud reliant that don’t need to be, the official switchbot API is a good example of this. There is absolutely no reason BLE commands need to go to the cloud and back. It makes me not want to support any of their products because their approach
to software engineering is so asinine despite their excellent hardware. On the other end of the spectrum, yeelight basically lists all their lan commands and just lets hobbyists and developers have at it, which I appreciate (despite WiFi being an inferior protocol for lighting, which is a separate discussion).
Ultimately, it’s up to consumers to stop supporting proprietary clouds with no local api control options, if you want companies to change stop buying their stuff.
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Also, let’s be clear, the reason companies want stuff running through their cloud instead of locally is to get user metrics and potentially sell your data.
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But of course. I spent $80 on a ST Hub and have hundreds of devices pinging their servers every second.
But agreed, give us local first and steal as much data as you like as long as I have an internet connection and agree to the T&C but don’t make it so it does t work without the internet.
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So glad I moved to Home Assistant in January. Haven’t had one outage! Strongly recommend it. A little bit of a learning curve but worth it in the end!
I recently took the offer to upgrade my old 2013 Smartthings hub to the new Aerotec hub. Here’s a summary of what to expect:
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You need to manually delete all your old devices from the old hub. Some (most?) Z-wave devices store information about the hub, and so the best way to reset them, sometimes the ONLY way, is to first remove them from the old hub.
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Removing them is not all that easy. Some, like the old Multifunction Smartthings are easy, they just get deleted. GE Outlets are PAINFUL, you need to move the old hub NEXT TO THE GE OUTLET and then remove it. Then do the same with the new hub to add it. Specifics probably depends on the model. You need to find the magic combination to remove it, here are some that worked for me:
- Simply turn it on
- Turn it on/off three times quickly
- Turn it on off 5 times quickly and hold the last ON press for 10 seconds
- Pull the AIR tab and hold the ON while pushing it back in.
In some cases I honestly couldn’t say which one worked since there is a delay from taking the action from the app accepting the deletion. But do it…
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Adding the devices, not that bad once you manage to get them deleted.
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Use the old graph website to add your old apps if you have any, the new Smartthings app can’t do it.
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GE Outlets on the new HUB are apparently not working… sometimes, or some models. They simply go OFFLINE for not reason at all. I’ve been getting help from Aerotec, but they’ve now redirected me to Smartthings for more debugging. It might work for a day, maybe two, maybe 10 minutes, but then… OFFLINE. My ONLY change was the hub, so I know what I think is broken
Generally I suggest you WAIT to get an upgrade as long as you can, so these bugs with the outlets can get fixed, IF they can find them. I am regretting my early upgrade now, but hey, maybe they’ll fix it for you guys. It’s VERY painful, and of course the new app is not helping either.
Best of luck, hope this helps someone
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All. 
You need to find the magic combination to remove it
This varies from model to model. You just have to find the user manual online to find out how to exclude it (if it’s zwave) or reset it (if it’s a Zigbee).
For zwave, this is usually a specific tap pattern on the device itself, but it’s up to the manufacturer.
For zigbee, normally you just have to take it off power and restore it.
Anyway, with zwave your goal isn’t just to “delete“ the device from your network, it’s to get the device itself to accept an “exclusion“ command. normally a delete request will do the exclusion as well, but it doesn’t always.
Anytime you have a zwave device that won’t add to a new hub, the first troubleshooting step is to issue a “general exclusion“ to clear out the old network information that is stored in the device.
This has been discussed many times in the forum, but the good news is that The people who wrote the Z wave standard understood that you might not always have your old hub. Maybe the hub itself broke, maybe you bought the device used, maybe you bought a new device but it was connected to a test network at the factory and they forgot to clear out that information. So the Z wave standard allows you to issue the general exclusion command from your new hub. You do that, you do something with the device itself to accept the exclusion command, and then you will be ready to try adding it.
Here are the instructions for issuing a general exclude using the new V3 app for a V3 hub or the new Aeotec hub:
The bad news is you can’t just randomly try different tap patterns on your own or use a tap pattern from a different model because it might do something other than clear out The old network information. I know it’s tedious, but you really do need to find the user manual and find the specific method for excluding each device. Otherwise you might instead be setting associations or changing a parameter, but not clearing the network info, which is one of the reasons people get frustrated.
Use the old graph website to add your old apps if you have any, the new Smartthings app can’t do it
In order to get to the web interface to your smartthings account, always use the universal sign in URL
https://account.smartthings.com
And this is the URL you should reference in any forum posts. This URL will work for anyone’s account, even though different people actually have different URLs for their web interface. This just has to do with balancing the load in the cloud. So “the old graph website“ is the IDE at the universal sign in. 
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As part of my recent device migration to another hub, I tracked down the manuals for all my devices and saved the PDFs to a OneDrive folder. This gave me a long term reference for the pairing and unpairing instructions for future use. For one or two tricky types of devices I left myself a “README” note in that folder (e.g., the PEQ Motion Detector manual sucks and doesn’t show where the reset button is, but says you should press it).
Anytime I buy a new type of device I now add the downloaded PDF documentation into that folder.
My suggestion is that anymore moving their devices to a new hub do the same (if you haven’t already).
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Check for phantom devices in your mesh. I have had that cause them to go offline.
Also, check the route in IDE that your outlets are taking.
I had a similar experience with things randomly going offline and it turned out to be a combination of two phantom devices that I had to forcefully remove along with one hardwired device that all of the troublesome devices were hoping through having an intermittent failure (e.g.: that one device would randomly drop the radio for 5-50 minutes or so and that would also force everything routing through it to also go offline). After removing the phantom devices and replacing that failing devices I’m now back at 100% stable.
Good idea, I’m doing the same.
Yes, when I say “Delete” I meant to “remove it” from the hub, not just a force-delete of course. Finding old manuals are sometimes possible, sometimes not, depending on how old they are and how many time you have had your wife clean your records when you move. Anyway, google is your friend.
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