App List Devices (Offline)

I have on a number of occasions (including today) seen devices listed offline in the SmartThings app and in the web interface. Yet these devices still respond to all routines and can still be controlled thru the web interface. Clearly there is a problem with SmartThings keeping actual track of what is and is not offline. Any one else notice the same?

I’ve had devices go offline (looking at you GE/Jasco receptacles) and stay that way until they were hard powered off with the breaker. These devices would still work with routines that I had created, but would not work with the app. I still have random leak sensors go off/online today. I’ve check a few times and tested them by putting them in water, they would report the water event as they were supposed to do. Annoying, but as long as they do what they need to do in a crisis.

Yes, ‘device health’ in its various forms has always been a little problematic. No one ever pretended otherwise. Mind you we were never told anything much about it anyway. It was what it was (and still is). In the case of hub connected devices all we really knew (and know) is that ‘online’ meant that there had been some positive evidence to indicate a device was likely working as expected, or that there wasn’t adequate evidence being collected to be able to determine that, and that ‘offline’ just meant an absence of that evidence for a period of time.

Then the ‘new’ app, as we tended to call it at the time, started flying in the face of everything we knew and actually stopped letting us control ‘offline’ devices, preventing us just ignoring the issue going forward.

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