Announcement | Changes to our Legacy SmartThings Platform

You can reserve an IP on most, if not all, modern routers. This effectively gives you a fixed IP for any device on your network. As a bonus, it’s much easier to manage your network IP allocations this way because they are all controlled in one location. For many of the integrations with HE like the Lightify Gateway, Hubconnect, Google Chromecast, etc. It’s recommended to reserve IP addresses in the router.

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We don’t know exactly the details

Not with my router it isn’t! It doesn’t allow you to free up a reserved IP unless that device has connected recently enough to show in its connection list. I had to completely reset it last time I forgot what IPs I had reserved and vowed never to do it again. Anyway I know it’s “recommended” but Hue gives you the choice. And why not?

What router are you using?

They discuss this news on the latest Stacey on IoT podcast with ST head of engineering @mark.benson as a guest. I’m listening now.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3G9kfWr7HEPBAcV41QSB4J?si=3g9WhXd1QyaKwfSo6QVhIA&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A5PnSF8EhThscOruuCiyYsG

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Don’t laugh - it’s a Hub One that came from our ISP. It’s pretty dumb but it’s just one box to find space for and it doesn’t hassle us if we don’t hassle it :slight_smile:

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Hi @ogiewon, I’m following Hubitat closely. My concerns about their Zigbee stability seem to have been addressed, and I absolutely don’t want multiple Hubitat hubs to address the large number of Zigbee devices I have. I need to see a better mobile app as well. I’ve also been seeing a lot of posts on rebooting the hub? Is that an issue with the hub, or isolated to certain users?

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I have personally found that the ST philosophy of having ONE large powerful hub, does not have to be followed. As a matter of fact, there are many benefits to having more than one hub.
One particular benefit is that certain devices don’t play well with others. For example, XIaomi sensors don’t interface well with most other Zigbee devices. Most brands of Zigbee lights (not Sengled) also don’t “play well” with others.
Spreading out the load among other machines is another common reason to have multiple hubs. In addition, for many active “diy’ers” having a “production” hub and a development hub is their approach.
This was all made possible by the community developed HubConnect.
Another key is that a Hub costs less than 2 switches!

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This much I know is being worked on. I have done some basic testing of creating a new app and things generally work well. However, the difficulty in sharing code (especially with people who will immediately get lost in the first few steps of setting things up) is what concerns me so far.

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Personally, I only ever used the ST Mobile App to configure the system. I used Action Tiles as my main ST UI. So, when I started with Hubitat back in Jan 2018 - before Hubitat had a mobile app - I really did not miss it. Even with Hubitat’s iOS and Android mobile app being available now, I really don’t use it as I find the alternatives better for my needs. I use Life360 for mobile presence and Pushover for notifications. Both of these provide much better reliability/functionality that I even had with ST’s mobile app. I agree Hubitat’s mobile app needs some improvements.

For device remote control, I use simple Hubitat Dashboards for the few times I need to interact with the devices while away from home. The nice thing about Hubitat Dashboards is that they work locally (via a direct LAN connection to the Hub, as well as remotely via Hubitat’s Cloud endpoint server.) I have also tried SharpTools, which is a very nice cloud-based solution. The Home Remote now supports Hubitat as well, which is a very nice native mobile app. I also use an iPhone, which means I have all of my devices appearing in HomeKit (via Homebridge) and this also works very well. So, there are many options available.

Good question and I know that this is a focus of Hubitat’s Engineering Team. My Hubitat hub has been very reliable, however I have occasionally felt the need to reboot the hub. I believe there may be a resource exhaustion issue that can be triggered by custom code. I do run quite a bit of custom code on my hub. Definitely early webCoRE ports to Hubitat really bogged down the hub. However, recent improvements and optimizations seem to have greatly improved the performance and reliability (based on some user reports in the forum.) Can users write bad code/rules that bring the hub down - yes. Does every user reboot their hub routinely - no. I do not reboot my Hubitat hub on any routine schedule.

Local processing, backup/restore, firmware upgrades based on user’s decision of if/when to upgrade, data privacy, etc… are the reasons I like Hubitat.

I hope the new ST platform is a success. I am curious about all of the changes… However, I will admit that I am a little weary of how long it has been taking Samsung to move everything to the new platform. Having to learn a new way of writing device handlers and smart apps is not all that appealing to me as I get older. I just want things to work these days. Currently, my home is pretty much automated the way I want it. Thus, I have no personal ‘needs’ that aren’t being met. “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” so to speak. Thus, others will need to pick up the ‘community development torch’ to learn the new ST platform and integrate those devices/platforms that are not natively supported by Samsung.

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I like the idea of having a Dev hub, but I still very much prefer one for “prod”. I understand why you’d want more, as you’ve outlined, but I also spend quite a bit of effort ensuring devices play well together. Ever since I’ve done that I’ve had zero issues with my zigbee mesh in almost a year (maybe longer). We’ll see where ST is going, and how long this takes, but now I’m more open to options than ever before.

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As far as I can tell the options to maintain your old DTHs and SmartApps are 1. Host on AWS 2. Local node.js server 3. Hubitat hub (which would then be connected to ST)

If this is correct and they will all still run properly then this isn’t that bad, but it’s still an annoyance and an extra cost for hosting or a new hub.

@ogiewon, your last paragraph was absolutely spot on. I couldn’t have said it any better. Everything I have just works now the way we want. The need for a good mobile app is for my family that still uses it quite a bit.

I have a lot invested in ST, including major appliances now, so I don’t expect to ever stop using it. I just hope a lot more details start coming from ST sooner than later so rumors and misinformation don’t prevail.

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Thanks for sharing. I just finished listening… So, ST Classic App is supposed to be gone by the end of 2020 according to Mark Benson. Classic IDE to be retired sometime in 2021.

Custom SmartApps, using the language of your choice, will need to be remotely hosted somewhere other than the ST cloud.

Still support for custom DTH’s which is very good news.

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ok, i’ve finished listening. It’s light on details, but some good discussion on future SmartThings direction.

TL;DL

  1. The goal is to make it easier for the mass user base (now 62 million) to get more benefit from their SmartThings experience. Easier to use app, no copy/pasting code, etc. There is a clear focus on making things easy for non-techie people
  2. hardware. Unless i’m missing something, the hardware direction doesn’t sound any different than the strategy from SDC 2019. Maybe the BI article was a bit click bait-y? Samsung SmartThings will still have their own in house hub and products, but there is a big push for the WWST and WASH programs. Mark reiterated that hubs are important and the goal is to get them embedded in more things through their WASH partners.
  3. The goal is to retire Classic app the end of Q3/beginning of Q4
  4. They plan to still have tools that provide the same function as custom device handlers for hub connected devices
  5. Plan to retire the Groovy IDE in 2021
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@SmartThings, with the legacy platform going away, will Samsung be porting missing functionality into the new platform?
eg, the classic platform has a smartapp that will “send alert if sensor open for more than X minutes”. There’s no equivalent functionality in the new app (it really should be an automation, not a smartapp) but the classic smartapp has worked fine for now in the new system.
It would be really unfortunate if this native functionality goes completely away and I’m left with the option “code it yourself or wait for the community”.

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Thanks for sharing @Automated_House.

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If IDE goes put the same system on the Hub to run locally and be able to AUTH update services. I think this would resolve alot of the issues people are worried about. I can see why they don’t want to store things on a cloud server ran by them, they don’t get anything from it. Just my opinion.

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I think you meant zigbee…Samsung made zwave devices for a security system in South Korea from a different division, but none of the SmartThings brand devices have zwave except the hubs. :sunglasses:

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Actually, they get your data. You are their real product. Knowing information about ~62 million people has tremendous value to a company like Samsung. This data can be mined for all sorts of information that will allow them to build and market products better to users around the world. One cannot dismiss the value of this sort of information, which every ST user hands over freely to Samsung.

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