Concerns about Direction of Developer Workspace

I just opened another thread about this problem of “https requirement” and the complexity of the new development model.

Am I missing something? From my point of view, I need to develop a network-hub-connected (UPNP&SSDP) device, but the documentation for hub-connected devices seems to specify it will be only zigbee and zwave… :frowning:

The documentation for hub connected devices is not complete.

I am not a new user, but have grown my system by using the generous work of the community. What happens to all the time I spent setting this up. Let’s face it most of the Device Type Handlers provided by SmartThings are far from as good as the ones created by the community. Smartapps like Ask Alexa, WebCoRe, Big Talker etc, what happens to them. Also I am on a Mac, and very few of the work a rounds are for Mac. Windows, Raspberry Pi YES. I and many others are very concerned, that the promise of a system for everyone is going to be a pipe dream, and gone in a puff of smoke. I have so many devices that ST doesn’t support, what about them???

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@joelw135 @anon36505037 @carl.debilly @GRClark @eric182 @Jwwhite @Danabw

I have merged all of the concerns about SmartApps, development, and publication here.

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You better have a long list and a sharp pencil ready!

I am feeling the same way - which is perhaps why other options are starting to pop up to fill the space that (from my perspective) ST is abandoning with these changes.

I am seriously starting to look at migration paths from my current set of solutions to other options such as Hubitat for this reason alone

:+1:

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So there will be a long transition period then it will all break when we throw it away - not overnight but over the (figurative) fortnight? Regardless it does have this feeling of "Yeah we know you all invested time and treasure to build to your needs within the processes and standards that are available, but hey … its all going to go in the crapper and you will need to redo everything or migrate to other solutions and redo everything

If that is the case, why not migrate to a fully local processing solution and redo everything … gotta do the work anyway.

No. We are not taking anything away. When I say transition, I mean that we have been building all of these new ways of building apps - hopefully people will see the value in them and use them.

Not at all.

Local Processing is one of the reasons for these changes. The current groovy based model designed for a certain kind of operation. The platform was designed for a certain kind of operation. A lot of this retooling is going to give developers more access to local processing and other features that were previously unavailable.

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No. The old way will continue to work. Your hosted groovy smartapps will continue to work. But groovy smartapps are not the future of the platform. They will still work but all of the new tooling and infrastructure is being built to be more modular by design.

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Jody, I don’t want to sound repetitive, but I am not a programmer, and want to grow with the community. If everything will have to be self hosted, how does an non programmer do this. Sounds like a daunting task. Also how do we get the hosted content if we don’t program? This question is very important to me and to a large portion of the community, that depended on the hard work of others.

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I’m pretty sure he means will continue to work as-is, you won’t need to move your apps/handlers.

Yes I understand that, but eventually it will be gone. What most people don’t do is “Read Between The Lines” SmartThings is going to make this a Pay for content system. If you can’t host it pay for it. They don’t say it, but I have been in business long enough to see it coming fast. I can see the headlights of that train moving down the track.

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It might be clear, but you can’t improve your home system by sitting stagnate, as Smartapps get better, New devices are found etc. Which means for many what they have is what they have, can’t move on without a server or maybe programming involved, am I correct?

It takes some faulty assumptions to arrive at this conclusion, and the reason those assumptions exist is our fault.

  1. We don’t have a good distribution model - This causes you to either put someones’s github repo in the IDE or copy and paste some code. I don’t think anyone would say this is an ideal model. If we make it easier for developers to “publish” their SmartApps, regardless of location of hosting, it will be easier for you the non-developer to install said solutions.

  2. Being self hosted does not mean that “you” the consumer of the app would need to have servers or hosting. It just means that the SmartApp developer could host their solution externally on whatever equipment makes sense to them. ActionTiles does this, SharpTools does this, as do many other existing solutions that a lot of folks enjoy today. There are already solutions that do not run within the confines of the groovy sandbox.

Copy and Pasting of code is not a great User Experience. Full Stop.

For 99.9% of our customers, it’s not something they want or care to do. The end goal is to get those apps that are only shared via code on the community in front of the millions of users who wouldn’t ever see it otherwise. That means some sort of marketplace or discovery.

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To be honest about this, it was one of the “turn-off” adopting the platform when I choosed SmartThings. Not paying for it means I’m totally dependant on what Samsung is doing with it. It’s a kind of Ponzi scheme… I mean somebody has to pay or the service can be closed. I’m totally ok paying an annual fee for SmartThings. It could also be something like first XX devices are free. Anyway… that’s totally another subject :-).

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I can see, that we all agree that we have to wait and see what SmartThings comes up with. But until they can compete with the better Device Types written by the community, an out of the can Vanilla system will not make it. I am also not sure that 99% of the users are willing to accept this new system. But I will give ST the benefit of the doubt, and wait and see. Besides I am getting way too worked up about this!:zipper_mouth_face:

Most of our customers do not use any custom DTH.

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OK I’m sure you know better than I do about your customers. So I will sit back and wait. But I reserve the right to open my big mouth if things go wrong!

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I absolutely believe the above is true.

And these SmartThings customers are missing the tremendous benefits of many of the custom DTH (including Virtual Switches even!).

What short sighted folks here aren’t seeing is that the new model makes custom DH and SmartApps Developer and Average Customer friendly. It does not cater to mere Power-Users, however; but the definition of that category is subjective. Regardless, it is a trivial group in proportion to everyone else.

This isn’t a criticism or belittlement of these constituents - just a business reality and a pretty obvious strategic decision by Samsung SmartThings given the numbers involved.

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So its safe to assume that my smartapps and device handlers with connected githtub repos will remain in tact indefinitely? just between nst manager and webcore im in too deep with github repos to deal with reinstalling the device handlers and smartapps and rebuilding everything that goes with them. would those just be migrated somehow to retain all of the current settings and apps?