App Versus Website

[JDRoberts]

@sfink16

I just order the ADT Smartthings starter kit as a replacement home security my IRIS system is ending. For those of us who do not turn our phones on much, I realize that setup needs to be done via the app, but is there a website that allows some functionality on a website? I prefer to do things on my desktop PC rather than an app on my phone. I couldn’t find the answer via a search.

Longer answer: it depends on exactly what you want to do.

1. There is a Web interface to your cloud account, which is called the IDE, and which you can get to by clicking the link in the upper right to “developer tools” on the first page of this forum.

It lets you see a list of your devices but you can’t turn them on and off or anything from there. You can run some utilities and check settings and a few things like that. You can also add new code if you are a coder.

2. if you use webcore, which is a community – created rules engine, it has a web interface and so you can create all of your automations there.

FAQ: What is WebCoRE? (And what was CoRE?)

CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.” Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you. For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog. [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface. This allows for flexibility and an architecture that requires more memory than is av…

3. if you want to have on/off control or see the status of your devices, there is a very popular third-party dashboard called actiontiles which will run in pretty much any web browser. Many people in the community use that for wall-mounted tablets, for example. But you can also use it on a laptop or almost anything with a browser.

The license fee is about $30 per hub (not per device) and the dashboard is customizable so you can show just a selection of your devices, or add tiles to initiate automations or other options. There’s a free trial if you want to try it.

ActionTiles for SmartThings

It’s important to note, however, that none of those options give you access to the ADT – specific aspects of the ADT hub model. That is, you can’t arm or disarm the system, or dismiss notifications, through those web interfaces. For those features you have to either use the app, The Alexa interface, the ADT fob, or the ADT panel itself.