SmartThings PR department really needs to repair their relationship with CNET. Someone is not doing their job.
Or they don’t care what’s in the media…
That’s assuming Samsung still has PR for SmartThings. Their Twitter has been silent since November and their hasn’t been a single announcement outside of trade shows or dev conferences about their global rollout and all the devices they are adding compatibility for as part of that rollout. Pathetic really.
The amount and breadth of SmartThings’s marketing & PR has always been a mystery to me. Sure, in the past we’ve seen orchestrated Facebook/Twitter ad campaigns and semi-regular blog entries; but not much else. Some good YouTube ads, but where were they shown?
I don’t watch TV with commercials - were there any? The same video as YouTube, or ?
What about print-magazine ads (in, ahem, CNET, or even CE Pro, etc., etc.)?
I’ve never seen nor heard much good about in-store displays (Best Buy, …) either.
So… While there’s less news and marketing than ever before, how much has there ever been? Or are ad-blockers making me clueless? Is there a whole bunch of advertising that I have been missing?
Well regardless of the PR situation, the article is not wrong though.
The platform as a whole has a lot of issues to work out, least of which is ease of use and reliability.
The occasional post about world-class UI/UX experts and blah blah blah just reinforces the fact that someone internally doesn’t really think anything is wrong, yet we all can agree that it’s not inaccurate when some article says it takes a lot of clicks to get to the settings you want, or that using the built in app for some device is easier than interfacing with it via ST.
The new app is rather nice.
The fact that there’s actually some simple rule creation in it, which should have been there since day one is pretty pleasing to see.
I mostly transitioned to Hubitat due to the uncertainty of all of my setup automations.
Like CNET says, it’s matured from a few years ago, but it still seems like Samsung is just throwing everything at the wall before it’s even cooked to see what sticks.
I still recommend SmartThings to people who I don’t think would appreciate the simplicity of Hubitat (read: no app or remote development access).
So there’s that.