@smartthings
I’m speaking to you not only as a user and developer on your platform, but as the CTO of a number of influential tech companies over the past 2 decades:
While I understand the need to push the product forward into more mainstream acceptance, you are endangering alienating the development community that allowed your company to prosper and catch the attention of Samsung, leading to your $200M+ acquisition. No one is denying your need to perform this clean-sweep activity, but I do caution you on one area:
SmartThings has never had a coherent strategy for migration from hub to hub. Most people have settled on v1 or v2 or v3 hubs because they are not willing to migrate over from scratch. The migration from v1 to v2, I believe we can all agree, was an unmitigated disaster. When v3 and the ADT partnership came along, most of us with 100s of devices did not think it was worth the weeks of pain.
I’ve spoken to engineers and management at your company, both before and after the acquisition. Migration paths for users is not anywhere on anyone’s lips. I don’t know if it’s because your platform can’t easily migrate, or because you aren’t interested.
I can, however, tell you from experience at other companies that if you force your customers to move hubs without migration aides or give up application integration they have come to rely on without giving them a very good reason to do so, they will leave. Not some, but most. Why would they remain if moving to another smartthings hub is the same amount of effort as moving to a completely different platform?
Google lost market share when they shut down Works With Nest, Sonos is shedding users left and right because they are forcing people to choose between older hardware and newer software.
SmartThings is not a gaming platform or a new tablet. These are people’s homes you are screwing around with… Health, safety, protection, convenience and a way of life. If you are making this change without a safety net, you better have a very very good reason or you will sink the business.