Changes to SMS Service

Never heard of Twillio until now. How do people here use it?

I just signed up for a trial, verified my email and phone number and it didnt take long till I got lost.
After all was verified I get a screen asking me to “Get a Trial number”. I assumed this was the number I would use within ST?? If so, it wont help because the number Twilio gave me was a Canadian number with no way to change it.

I decided to go to the docs and found an option to “Send your first SMS message”. Great. It tells me I have to write (or download template) code and how to call this code. I really dont want to learn and new development interface, write more code, etc.

I assumed from the reading above that Twillio was an easy way to forward messages from ST to my phone. I expected I would get a Twillio phone number which I would use in ST. Am I wrong or missing something??

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is Twillio in the US … pricing is in dollers… GDPR…

Are you asking me? If so, this is what I found out so far. Yes, its in the US. Pricing per SMS is really cheap (.0075/SMS) but here is the kicker. It appears you have to pay a monthly fee for one of their numbers. As far as I can tell that is that is $5US/month. From what I have seen so far, Twillio is not a good alternative for me. Maybe I am missing something???

Twilio requires an integration between the SmartThings Cloud and the Twilio cloud. The resulting device in SmartThings would be one that supports the “Notification” capability. SmartApps would then send text to this ST device, which would result in the Twilio cloud being notified, and ultimately Twilio would send you a SMS text messsage to your phone.

At least, that is my understanding. IIRC, the problem with this design is that SmartThings doesn’t really seem to support using Notification devices in their Official SmartApps, instead relying on Push Notifications to the SmartThings App on your phone (or SMS…) If you only send messages from webCoRE, then it should be simple to use a service like Twilio or even Pushover.

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I’m less bothered about the loss of SMS and more annoyed about the way it has been handled by Samsung here. I’ve not received any notification of this at all, so my sms notifications will stop working tomorrow and had I not happened to pop in here for the first time in quite a while I would have known nothing about it. Crappy behaviour Samsung, as usual.

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Compared to other countries, Twilio SMS rates in the US aren’t bad - for example, take a look at the Twilio SMS pricing for the UK at $0.04/message or Belgium at $0.10/message. Then take into consideration the people complaining about a limit of 100 messages a day.

$0.10/message * 100/day * 30 days = $300/month for a single user abusing the system! :open_mouth:


Edit:
We’ve added a few more notification providers to the SharpTools.io Rule Engine to ease the transition for International Users who’ve recently lost SMS support from SmartThings.

This brings the list of SharpTools notifications providers to:

  • Pushover - send push messages to your phone, tablet, or desktop
  • Pushbullet - send push messages to your phone, tablet, or desktop
  • SMS (Premium) - send SMS messages to US/Canada (included with Premium)
  • Twilio SMS - send SMS messages (including international SMS support)!
  • Email - send email messages with ease
  • Thing - for example, Sonos, Echo Speaks, etc.

You can find more details on the new Twilio SMS and Pushover notification providers here:

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The PushOver approach is really very ease to use, and works well. Can be directed to individual or group users, and can be emphasized with relative importance.
It’s very easy to use in Hubitat, so I assume it can be easily used in SmartThings.
It’s better than SMS messages, but different.

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Never say never, they offered a month advanced notice on Sonos DTH changes, but my guess is that the change came from a different team than the sms decapitation plan. :slight_smile:

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But for the US a it’s free any way - no or little effect to US customers!
I don’t even use SMS, use push messages.
ITS THE POINT OF DOUBLE STANDARDS

Is it only webcore you can use pushover with? I can’t see any native option for it in my smartapps , can only see push or sms

I only started using SMS because they scrapped the contact book for push notifications. Now they’re scrapping SMS notification for non-US residents as well. All with less than 48hrs notice… @SmartThings It’s one thing to make changes to an essential service, but to do so with such little notice is extremely disappointing. Just from a safety perspective, I have a setup to notify family if there happens to be a smoke even in the middle of the night. This can now no longer be accomplished. Or receiving SMS notifications of events while travelling in the USA where I have no access to data which is required for push notifications. This may be the push I need to check into Hubitat and scrap smartthings just like they’re scrapping services. Very very short sighted on Samsung’s part. But hey… it’s only a “small number” right? I’m pretty sure if they were to add up all user outside the US, we’d outnumber the amount of users inside the US.

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Well this us extremely disappointing. UK based, power user, and make extensive use of the sms feature for a variety of things. This is a bit of a game changer.

Bad, bad move. Alternative?

BINGO!

WebCore and any apps made by @tonesto7 [RELEASE] Pushover Manager Platform Integration

So I moved all my apps and WebCore over to PushOver last night the only notifications left are those annoying low battery alerts and apps by @RBoy. Any chance @RBoy of getting PushOver added to your apps? @tonesto7 provided a nice demo app here https://github.com/tonesto7/pushover-manager/blob/master/smartapps/tonesto7/pushover-integration-demo.src/pushover-integration-demo.groovy

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For real?? Smartthings?? I thought that this was a joke when I first red it from Facebook. Then I came here and found out that it really disables SMS from all the other than US users. …and this…
“On September 25, 2019, we will be discontinuing our SMS text notification service outside of the US.”

Today? Once again, for real?

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Well, I was considering looking at Home Assistant so this just made up my mind. Not sure if it HA has SMS either, but this is more about the way Samsung treats it’s customers.

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So glad I got an official notification instead of having to remember to come into the group and happen to find this out on the day of… oh wait

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At least bring back “my contacts” so that notifications are more useful.

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Yep! Yesterday I went through all my pistons and smartapps just to get a picture of how many of them send sms. (10 pistons and 10 smartapps). And don’t get me wrong…in one piston there might be 3-4 different actions to send sms.

Push notification isn’t that bad but with SMS:

  • possibility to choose what notifications are sent to what numbers (@David_Van, like you said… My contacts!!!)
  • when internet breaks down or you are in a spot where only gprs is available… you still can trust that basic sms goes through
  • messages to people who has no ST app installed to their phones or devices

I have wife and two kids. All of them have ST app installed to phone. I do not wan’t my kids to get notifications like “car heater is on” or “xxx arrived school”. Those notifications are for adults/parents. My wife does not not want to know when 3d printer is ready to print. Now I should push all the messages to everyone or no messages at all for certain people…

What is more annoying is the way this was announced. It would be cool to see those statistics behind the comment:
“A small number of customers with non-US phone numbers will no longer receive SMS notifications from SmartThings.”

Small number of customers. Small…is it 1, 10, 100, 1000, few thousands…

IT would be almost same that Toyota would announce that we will remove glove boxes from our cars because just a s mall number of customers are using it.

By the way… what do I have to do that I would receive this kind of announcements to my email. I though this would happen automatically because I’m ST customer. No information about ST firmware updates, no information about sms changes.

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