Samsung seems to be having chronic problems as the platform is getting more and more unstable. Are they in this niche of the business or do they want to make Tv’s and appliances. This is getting real old and am tired of having to reset the app and make corrections. Come on Samsung, get committed or get out of the sector.
You know they’ve already announced they will no longer sell or support smartthings branded Home automation hardware, including the hub, right? They are turning that over to partner companies. Samsung will continue to offer the cloud and the app.
Official announcement thread:
So, yeah, I think their future direction is pretty clear.
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Personally I’m withholding judgement at the current time. They (ST) are in the middle of a platform transition right now - We cannot forget this. It essentially amounts to “OK we’re keeping none of this stuff over here, some of this in this pile and moving all of the things in that pile over to partners… Everything else we’re REBUILDING FROM SCRATCH and gluing it to the old stuff…”
Yes it’s basically that simple. They’re throwing a lot of stuff out and restarting. The biggest problem (from my perspective) is they did a piss poor job of setting expectations with existing customers about what that would mean to their installs.
We got “Hey come on over to the new app and infrastructure, we’ve been making it ready for you it’s all going to be JUST FINE…”
They should have instead said, “Ok we are going to completely flip the applecart. It’s going to be BAD - VERY BAD for a couple months while we switch a lot of stuff out, but at the end of the day we’re going to all be better off - you as an end user with new capabilities and us as a provided because it will be easier to deliver”
Of course we know why - one of those messages is VERY hard to swallow - no matter how true it is.
We know they’re right in the middle of disconnecting the legacy infrastructure and - guess what, they’ve broken some stuff while they did. Heck, they broke a LOT of stuff.
- Busted automations and scenes (moving to rules API in newapp)
- Busted communications (ZWave and Zigbee firmware updates).
- Busted timers (moving Sunrise/sunset out of hello Home and into SmartLighting)
But in each case, they’ve been on top of fixing it - and we’re on the edge of seeing these new promised features emerge… (Zigbee channel change, Local processing in built-in automations for instance is in beta, and works well…)
So IMHO - you’re probably going to see ‘weirdness’ for another couple months as they stabilize into the new infrastructure. Once we get through that and we’re all over there with no IDE hanging off the side - THEN I’ll start passing judgement based on what the environment is supposed to be - not what we have now in a half transitioned state.
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Thanks, that explains why I can’t find any Samsung accessories like motion detectors etc. I did not see that announced. I’ve already dumped WINK because they provide little to no service and want to charge for doing a lousy job of it. If I ran my business like that I’d be out of business.
Right, it will all be Aeotec branded going forward if you are in the US or Europe. I’m not sure if they’ve announced partners for other regions yet.
The initial Aeotec line is identical to the previous smartthings brand devices, just rebadged.
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Agree, thanks
I’ve got aotec products and their pretty good. They work well and are feature rich
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Agreed, but this will be their first foray into Zigbee. They’ve been Zwave only up until now.
What’s hilarious is aeotec can’t be bothered to provide proper drivers for their own (zwave) devices for smartthings that enable all their features, but is now the only seller of a smartthings hub in north america and europe.
Relying on the community to develop drivers shouldn’t be an option for the company supplying the official hub. It’s embarrassing. Fibaro / zooz / inovelli do this too but they aren’t literally selling the only hub for the platform either …
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Perhaps you forgot that it has been 3 years now since the “new” app and infrastructure was released and recommended for new ST users?
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Slow moving transition.
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Their devices are feature rich with custom DTH only
Agree 100%. Stock Aeotec handlers are complete trash
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Hey guys!
I have used several smarthome hubs from many makers. I was excited about each one, and every time my internet was down they all sucked, and I couldn’t turn the lights off. My ISP does maintenance work after midnight, and so a couple hours before I go to bed every night I run the risk of loosing Internet.
That problem has finally been cured… The Internet still goes down frequently, but my newest hub from Hubbitat keeps on working… Automations and all!!. I’m sure I loose some capability without the Internet, but I haven’t experienced any perceived losses. I run my own internal network with my own DHCP service, so my network is up when the Internet is down.
I’ll get Starlink later this year, as a backup provider, so that will help… But yeah, with Wink and Smartthings circling the drain, Hubbitat is there to take over.
I had zero problems integrating Hubitat, in fact it is so much better than all of the others out there.
It is supposed to be a little more complicated because they let you build your own dashboards, but for a smarthings user with years of experience, hubbitat was a breeze.
I’m here because smartthings was trying to sell me a new hub. I have ditched smartthings and wink both, and have migrated all of my wifi assets into hubbitat… Sooo much easier than the rest. Very powerful, independant of active internet, better compatibility, better stability. Both wink and Smartthings would do things like drop Cree or sengled bulbs off the network over and over, and they were always difficult to bring back up… No more! Everything is reliable and stable now.
I own 4 smartthing hubs, including a new one in an unopened box I bought as a spare when smartthings support thought my hub was bad… It was only bad software and support… I’m a big samsung fan, but they messed up Smartthings.
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I would love to ditch smarthings. I had Wink, I got rid of wink and would dump smarthings in a minute. I have the same problems with Phillips wifi bulbs, and other devices. Is the Hubitat a product that be setup by someone that know enough to be dangerous or is it a real techy kind of product. I’m sick and tired of spending my days unscrewing up issues that smarthings screwed up almost on a daily basis
Check out their community forum. Lots of ex smartthings users frequent it, including me.
It’s at least as helpful as this place is, due to the users. The difference however, is that the hardware works (and works well), plus the actual owners/developers of the platform are frequent posters. They listen to and respond to the needs of their users.
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