Changes to SMS Service

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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Sorry, I was thinking of Hubitat where it’s very easy to use pushover for push messages and twillio for text messages.
Push messages with Pushover can be customized to go to one individual or groups, very easily.

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The ‘Notification’ capability has always seemed a more elegant concept that could usefully abstract all notifications, after all what is so special about notifications that they should be handled differently to the various other capabilities? As it stands it does have the obvious flaw that the deviceNotification() command only has an argument for the text of the notification and not the recipient(s), implying the need for a one to one correspondence between a device/service and a (group of) recipient(s), and inevitably leading to some device/service specific fudges to embed the recipients in the text. Similarly there isn’t any standard way to to flag the severity of the notification or indeed the origin.

I do note that not only does the Notification capability not seem to be particularly prominent (or indeed used at all) in official SmartApps, but the capability isn’t currently listed in the documentation for the ‘new’ environment. Neither is the Audio Notification, come to that. Neither seems to be the way forward, but a single replacement for both seems to have potential.

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Astute observation.

As I was among the first proposers of the Capability (well, TBH: The entire "Capability Type Suggestions category on this Community was my idea … :smirk:), I’m quite aware that the initiative failed.

While Capabilities may not be the optimal method to implement Notifications or other various features, they are a feasible and pragmatic option. Unfortunately, SmartThings Engineering does not agree or simply has ignored or abandoned the possibility. :disappointed:

Plenty of users were getting e-mails, though there were different versions of the e-mail for US users and for non-US users and it was clear that some of them were getting the ‘wrong’ version for their situation. I don’t know what the criteria were for receiving an e-mail. I didn’t get one, but then I don’t have any SMS notifications set up. If I did receive one, would it have been for me as a UK user, or would my having been assigned to the ‘graph.api.smarthings.com’ shard inadvertently flag me as a US user?

As for the abrupt cessation of the SMS service outside the US, I’d like to think that Samsung might recognise that, for whatever reason (which might include circumstances largely outside their control), it hasn’t been handled as elegantly as it could have been.

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Exactly, I can only surmise from the grammar used that it was written by an American citizen. No tact, no understanding, no explanation, just brief and dismissive.
Also the short sightedness of an admin on here suspending/banning one of the singularly most active and helpful contributors to this forum (incorrectly for a “personal attack”), that has helped literally thousands of ST users, will leave a big hole for months and years to come, and certainly leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

The idea is that each ‘Thing’ is a recipient.

So if it was SMS, you might have one Thing for your phone, one Thing for your wife’s phone, etc.

Similarly, if it was a push service (like Pushbullet), you might have one Thing for your phone, one Thing for your tablet, etc.

This allows you to setup automations and pick and choose who you deliver messages to and via which delivery channel per automation.

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After you opt in, ST doesn’t send the last SMS for everyone. I tested 4 numbers and only 2 of the 4 got the last SMS after opting in. Ideally it should send the last SMS to avoid any loss of critical security alerts. :ant:

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Two things come to mind:

  1. “notifications” as a generic term often require third party services, and these are not always free to Samsung

  2. certain types of notifications, and specifically texts or phone calls, often fall under privacy regulations in different jurisdictions, including the EU. There is an additional business cost and complexity associated with meeting these regulations.

For both of these reasons, it is not surprising that many platforms meter or restrict the use of notification services in a way which is different from basic IOT commands.

That doesn’t excuse the abruptness or lack of communication with regard to this specific feature change, of course. :scream:

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