My apologies for the very basic question. I set up my SmartThings more than a year ago and I’ve forgotten a lot of what I did. I’m have a hard time getting reacquainted.
I’m aware of the Classic vs. STSC app, and I’m using STSC. In the app, I see I can create Automations or use Smart Apps. I’ve already got a few automations (like “if the garage door is open after 10pm, alert me by turning a lightbulb red”. I’ve got a couple of smart lighting apps, mostly to activate scenes in response to a virtual button (don’t remember why I did this… but I think it was a workaround for activating scenes from Actiontiles). I’ve also got the actiontiles and harmony apps, as well as the virtual device creator and webcoRE.
So my question is… should I be using automations or the smart lighting app for my basic functions? Seems like I can do it either way, but I’m not clear whether one is a legacy approach and the other is current. I seem to recall that smart lighting runs locally, but I don’t know if that’s true about “automations” as well.
Tracking this to learn as well - I have everything set up in Automations because it’s not clear to me what the difference is between smart apps and scenes and automations.
At the present time, the only thing that runs locally is smart lighting (either app) and some parts of smart home monitor (classic) or smartthings home monitor (new V3 app). Other automations or routines or smartapps do not yet run locally.
Other than that, it’s your choice, use whichever best fits your use case.
The other thing to keep in mind is that there is no limit to the amount of smart lighting rules that you can have. I believe there is a limit to the number of devices that you can have in all of your Automations and scenes combined. The last I knew the limit was 250 devices. That’s not 250 devices in your system but 250 referenced devices in your automations and scenes.
