At least bring back āmy contactsā so that notifications are more useful.
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 donāt get me wrongā¦in one piston there might be 3-4 different actions to send sms.
Push notification isnāt that bad but with SMS:
- possibility to choose what notifications are sent to what numbers (@David_Van, like you saidā¦ My contacts!!!)
- when internet breaks down or you are in a spot where only gprs is availableā¦ 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 wanāt my kids to get notifications like ācar heater is onā or āxxx arrived schoolā. 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 peopleā¦
What is more annoying is the way this was announced. It would be cool to see those statistics behind the comment:
āA small number of customers with non-US phone numbers will no longer receive SMS notifications from SmartThings.ā
Small number of customers. Smallā¦is it 1, 10, 100, 1000, few thousandsā¦
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 wayā¦ what do I have to do that I would receive this kind of announcements to my email. I though this would happen automatically because Iām ST customer. No information about ST firmware updates, no information about sms changes.
Sorry, I was thinking of Hubitat where itās 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.
The āNotificationā 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 isnāt 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 isnāt currently listed in the documentation for the ānewā 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.
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 ā¦ 
), Iām 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. 
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 āwrongā version for their situation. I donāt know what the criteria were for receiving an e-mail. I didnāt get one, but then I donāt 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 āgraph.api.smarthings.comā shard inadvertently flag me as a US user?
As for the abrupt cessation of the SMS service outside the US, Iād like to think that Samsung might recognise that, for whatever reason (which might include circumstances largely outside their control), it hasnāt been handled as elegantly as it could have been.
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 āpersonal attackā), 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 āThingā is a recipient.
So if it was SMS, you might have one Thing for your phone, one Thing for your wifeās 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.
After you opt in, ST doesnāt 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. 
Two things come to mind:
-
ānotificationsā as a generic term often require third party services, and these are not always free to Samsung
-
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 doesnāt excuse the abruptness or lack of communication with regard to this specific feature change, of course. 
With all due respect, letās not add blanket national prejudices to an already tense discussion. There are many American citizens, and I count myself among them, who make an effort to communicate in a way that conveys information and moves conversation forward without being, in your words, ābrief and dismissive.ā
Samsung is a multinational corporation with citizens from many different countries on staff. There is no reason to assume that national origin had any bearing on the way in which this particular announcement was handled.
Submitted with respect.
It definitely shouldnāt be seen as targeting nationally. Basically it looks like itās inevitable that this service will be gone for everyone eventually. Even US users will need to be added to an exception group so itās unlikely new users will get this in the near future no matter where youāre based.
Samsung just saw this as the best way to do this incrementally.
Yes, they could have given more notice and yes, they could have been more empathetic and less dismissive for all the users including myself impacted.
It really sucks, but it looks like itāll be gone for everyone eventually so no point complaining about it. Best for us to look at other ways to get a similar result.
Ok, So Iām probably an average user on this forum and you can color me VERY confused.
Iāve read through this whole thread and I really donāt get what Iām supposed to do to allow getting my text service back? (US Based) Besides calling some number and hoping I get the appropriate reply? Also does all the people I have Wecore and apps sending SMS to have to call the number and hope it goes through?
Also what are the limits? I donāt have ALOT of stuff like some people, but I have a few that we rely on for convenience and alerts about various things? So do I need to figure out the alternate method because I might hit some limit that I have no idea what it really is?
@TN_Oldman All phone numbers need to do this
Yes I got that part but thanks for picking it out of the thread for me. Itās still a post by some random Staffer ( I assume) that says call this number to opt in. In the thread you see where people are saying some phones get the supposed reply and others donāt.
Doesnāt really give any instruction or details beyond " Hey send us a sms and your Okay for now"
But again I do appreciate your reply and I really appreciate everyone in this forum!!
Yes I am aware that the classic Notification capability can work exactly like that, and I think it is a shame it hasnāt been taken up more. However at what point might the āthingsā just start getting in the way? What if you had a messaging service that already had its own contact database with the details of tens of potential recipients in it? Might it not be reasonable to be able to use a single āthingā for that service and pass on details of the recipient as an extra argument? What are the advantages of not allowing for that possibility?
Maybe I placed too much weight on passing recipients and should have emphasised the desirability of being able to communicate things such as priority, severity and source in a standardised way. I just feel that the notification capability could have been made a lot more appealing just by adding a few parameters.
@JDRoberts sorry if I gave the impression of a āblanketā summation, I was using the law of averages, for example youāre clearly an exception to the rule, eloquent and intelligent.
R.I.P. @anon36505037 
Regarding RW, I too hope he returns soon, but as many British parents would say, people who are intentionally offensive in the hopes of getting attention quite often receive more attention than they expected. 
(I donāt disagree with his goals, just his tactics. I didnāt flag his post, but Iām not surprised that enough people did to trigger a particular moderation threshold.)
Yeah, those are totally reasonable concerns that donāt seem to be addressed with the current model.
Device handlers on other platforms have done it in interesting ways like allowing the method to accept optional parameters (beyond the scope of the core capability) or even allowing special formatting of the message to keep within the scope of the original capability (eg. āThis is a regular Messageā, ā[E]This is an emergency priority messageā)
The formatting approach isnāt particularly intuitive, but itās something that could work within the current Notification capability design.