Since I spend most of my life in one of two rooms and I can’t use my hands much, I rely on voice control as much as possible, and if there’s a problem with any part of the home automation system, I will likely see it . I’ve had an echo for about a year. I have not seen the pattern of failures that you suggest around times when Amazon put it on sale, nor could I find any similar reports on echo forums.
I had a few hours on one day when it was slow to respond, but that wasn’t around a time of sale. And I ran into the annoying changing reserved word issue although things would still work if they were renamed. I’m not saying you haven’t had various issues, but it doesn’t look like it’s been a common experience nor one that is just an issue of scaling.
Grabbing any device from any manufacturer
As far as “grabbing any device from any manufacturer” and making it work with smartthings, that’s certainly true for most zwave devices (secondary controllers, not so much). And for most zigbee devices using the zigbee home automation profile. And for those with a cloud service with an open API.
But the list of devices that smartthings doesn’t work directly with is still much longer than the ones that it does. Bluetooth, Lutron, other zigbee, 433 MHz-- even just most cameras. obvious examples include the August lock, the Nestcam, DLink sensors, and Hunter Douglas fans.
SmartThings allows the use of many different devices, but it’s still a limited set. I don’t think that’s bad in and of itself, but I think it’s important to set expectations correctly. “Does this work with SmartThings?” Is still a meaningful question.
Being in IT I know 2 things happen when something like this comes up.
First the sinking feeling when you realize something you hadn’t considered that could be a problem is one.
Secondly, management wants to know why you didnt know about this and fix it beforehand. That is when I put in a purchase request for a crystal ball in my remediation paperwork
They think lots of money will fix it so I put in for this one:
