Agreed.
I’ve had similar experiences with Samsung Camera support being dropped after I bought 2 of them (one of them even bundled with the Smartthings starter kit!). And lately Sonos integration becoming inferior with text to speech gone, contact book scrapped and now no SMS messaging. It absolutely smacks of ‘writing on the wall’ (at least for ST as we currently know it).
I can only hope custom DTHs aren’t next on the hit list, if that happens then I’m definitely gone…
Accurate as ever @JDRoberts. We have to accept that things might change. However I think it is reasonable to expect from @SmartThings:
a) an explanation for the change
b) a reasonable amount of notice
c) perhaps a little regret or apology in the tone of the message
Any or all of these would have helped a little.
Yep it just sucks getting two days notice that it’ll be discontinued completely for UK users.
Taking the emotion it of this, anyone know of a reasonably easy way to get a US number to relay to the UK?
Not naive at all… losing WebCore SMS would be a real pain. It’s the only way my husband will look at a notification.
Do you mean “on or after”? I have to do this on the 26th?
As I understand it, there will be a change implemented on September 25. The first time you receive an SMS message from SmartThings after that change, you will be asked to reply with YES. If you do not respond YES, you will not receive additional messages. Any time after the cutover, you can send a message to 844-647 from a US number to start receiving messages.
Agreed on all of these, but they never have before… 
Thanks! (I thought I was all set with a ‘Yes’ today - I appreciate the heads up)
If the push notifications from the app could be improved it could mitigate my usage of SMS a lot. I got tired of having middle of the night notifications on low battery devices that would last for another 2 months I just turned off the notifications all together and switched to SMS. It also needs to be able to push to specific user accounts so that I don’t have to spam the family with all my “go check on ST problems” notices.
This is really poor customer service and creates s disparity between user functions and capability dependant on where you are located, UK vs USA.
This change is unacceptable and does not help maintain the same service I signed up for! I purchased the SmartThings hardware and ecosystem so that I can increase the ability to control and monitor all devices.
The removal of this feature severely limits the capability of the ecosystem in the UK.
Please reverse this decision or provide an alternative means to implement SMS notification in the UK.
Push notifications are of little value to me. I have ST set up in two homes, one in the US and one in Canada with both connected to a Canadian phone number. If I have to rely on push notifications to advise of water leaks etc I’ll have to find a new platform. Hopefully one that can connect to all the ST sensors I have invested in. Totally pissed with this move and the lack of notice. Maybe my new platform will actually connect to my Samsung TV.
The tone of the message, the lack of notice (2 days for such a big change is absolutely ridiculous), and no alternative offered makes it look like things will be going downhill from now on. Also, it feels very exclusive to be among “A small number of customers” as stated in the notice, thanks.
Question to the community: Any suggestions as to how I can notify friends when something happens without giving them full access to the app (not necessarily via sms) ?
I dont even use SMS , bought a load of D-Link camera for them to stop suporting them with SHM, come on @SmartThings at least tell us why non-US customers are getting treated diffently. You are reading this thread but just responding to your US customers!
It is like a statement, that we have only a small number of customers with non-US phone numbers.
As someone wrote, being a non-US customer is substandard. Suddenly we are the minority.
And I can guess all the SmartApps, including SHM will not be updated by SmartThings to highlight this feature inconsistency between region.
And as someone mentioned regarding the Push messages, they most of the time late. I woke up this morning, and opened the app. It started to show the messages from the automations over the night. 2, 4 or even 6 hours later. (My phone is a Samsung Galaxy S7.)
I use SMS notifications when away from home for a longer period, just to monitor the motion sensors in the house, that the cat hasn’t sneaked in. Or nobody else is inside the house. That would be great to receive Push messages hours later.
Is this product, as SmartThings, is reaching End of Life, and services has to be phased out slowly.
The effort pushed into the new SmartThings app and the new DTHs is pointless if the user experience declines due to poor management decision.
I would quote a fellow community member from another topic, this could be posted here too.
Maybe my expectations are really too low @joshua_lyon, or just realistic.
Why all the belly aching over this? Anyone in this forum that has an app relying on SMS is a power user by default. And power users should know that living on the bleeding edge comes with risks like this change. Power users should also view this as an opportunity to learn something new by rewriting their app to work using some other method. Many alternatives exist including setting up your own EU compliant Twilio service. We shouldn’t blame ST for not wanting to spread the costs of supporting this to everyone when those who rely on this are likely a very small fraction of all ST users. I’m assuming ST uses Twilio to do the SMS today and upgrading it to support GDPR is too costly. Anyway, I found all the complaining here to be useless - i think everyone would rather see this thread offer ideas for workarounds and alternatives. Has anyone implemented a robust shareable Twilio integration they are willing to share? I noticed that Hubitat also dropped SMS for I assume the same reason. Unlike ST they offer an official Twilio integration to ease the transition. I believe ST’s biggest mistake was not providing a similar offer.
is it? where did yuo read that?
Its not about the SMS its the double standards
It has to be. Otherwise why spend money to do something different that gives less capability to another region? I am however just assuming and based on the complexity of things we have to do in my day job to be GDPR compliant I believe this is a very good guess.
where abouts in the world are you?
from a GDPR aspect the already hold a tun of our personal data and contact details, so not sure how sending a SMS changes much apart from opting in, which i ASSUME is to prevent false or mistaken numbers beening entered in so that the SMS goes to the righ person.
Double standards
If the user entered that data; then the company isnt liable for sending it to that address…
This could be a GDPR thing; but since the text message (and your phone number) is given freely by the customer, all they would have to do is store it correctly and they’re fine…unless they was planning on sharing it with a 3rd party.
This is a massive blow to me as the push notifications are useless, I would sooner them turned around and said (to everyone, not just UK) - Texts are costing too much, its £*** to buy text credit on our system and you use them as you see fit.