I received an email with a link to take a customer satisfaction survey about my ST hub tonight. How appropriate is that…
I came home to hear from the wife that the bathroom fan hasn’t been turning off, the bathroom light hasn’t been turning on, the hall lights sometimes will turn on and only sometimes will turn off. This was the week after our garage door went up in the middle of the night with no reason. Of course that was after everything went dead for a day or so with the hub completely unresponsive and having to delete the location and start all over.
But other than that, I’ve been happy with it…
In all reality, since I have reset the hub and rebuilt the mesh, reinstalled all my rules it has been much better. The random changes in whether things will go off this week is nothing more than a minor annoyance so I gave the survey a fair shake, but in the end I have to be honest… Would I ever recommend this to anyone else?
Well not likely and it is because I realized a few things when I took the survey.
I’ve never figured out the original smartapp functionality. When I got my hub and installed my first few devices I quickly realized I couldn’t do anything of value with the smartapps that were available. I immediately came here, found several workarounds such as smart tiles, smart rules, and finally Rule Machine. When I rebuilt I didn’t install any of the local smartapps. I couldn’t find any that worked for my home… Oh I have Echo, Harmony, and IFTTT installed, but those are the only ones that I didn’t have to use the IDE to install.
Device Types? Same thing, many of my device types are custom from the community and installed from the IDE.
The reliability is not what I could recommend to someone that wants an off the shelf product that just works. I’m ok with some lighting not going off, not coming on, or flashing occasionally… Could I tell someone to buy it and not warn them of that? No way…
I’m hung right now with trying to integrate my harmony hub because of the object object bug. Expand that to the same bug with Echo, etc. If I recommended the product to anyone, how do you explain that yes it is supposed to do that, but only on certain days when it decides to work, on others maybe not.
I was excited tonight to learn that RM had a new release. I logged into the IDE (odd why was I logged out?) and tried to use the update from repo function. Nope, not working. Seriously? Is there any portion of the product that is stable and actually works from minute to minute? Again, another minor annoyance and one I found a work around for, but could I recommend it this way? Nope.
One of the questions was what “fun” type of integration or automation am I considering? Ahhhh, a month ago I could have named several. Now? I just struggle to think of what the wife will be calling about being broke in the next few hours…
Man, I really want to like the hub. I even ordered a new LED controller this week thinking I could get past all of this… What I need to add is a huge thank you to this community and forum. Without it I would have never gotten past step 1 with the hub. Rule Machine, smart rules, smart tile and all the custom device makers are the best things going with ST and they aren’t even part of ST… Wow. (Rant over)
I had an ecobee3 installed last week, and I have 5 new boxed items sitting on my table, that I cannot connect to my SmartThings hub because the app is broken. Then I get a survey.
You can imagine how I scored my overall satisfaction.
Did anyone else get an email survey about Smartthings? I took one thing away from the survey. They’re thinking of, probbly planning to already actually, spin it off from Samsung. They’ll “own” it I think but make it a standlone unit. It’s hard to get other manufacturers to build to a standard owned and designed by a competitor. GE is not going to build Smartthings into it’s washers. No way. So the spinoff may actually be a good thing.
Samsung has very little to do with SmartThings as it is. SmartThings was a kick-starter funded project which was later bought out by Samsung. It still very much runs as a separate company.
Since the firmware and server upgrades mine had been 100% solid and I even reccomnded it to a handful of people. Take the survey yesterday and, I kid you not, last night and this morning two time based events fail
I am extremely dissapointed with smartthings. I setup a simple, single zwave switch in my vacation home. It worked fine while there, then when I came home (700+ miles away) it stopped working. I then came to find out that there really is no support for smartthings, even though the web support page still says there is “chat” support, that was turned off long ago.
I’ve tried the email support, and sometimes it takes 8-10 days for a response. I don’t blame the support engineers, obviously they are way understaffed. Here is my message to smartthings: you do not have a product, until you start supporting it, and currently, IMO, your support is non-existent. Simple things like turning a switch on&off should just work, that is why I bought a smartthings hub in the first place so I didn’t have to rely on my own programming.
Well, that’s why they’re asking. They want to know what to do with ST and what to do next. It’s an opportunity to vent to people who actually can do something about it.
Agreed, I also received the survey. I am a new SmartThings user but still in my limited use have noticed some unreliable items that I could not answer the, “Would you recommend this to friends?” with a high score. For now, it is something I toy around with, but would not recommend a friend spend a lot of money on and expect a highly reliable item. I am hoping for more improvements in the future.
Surprisingly I got the survey as well and probably surprising to a lot of people here but I actually rated the question of “Would you recommend this to your friends” quite low indeed.
I love SmartThings but I can cope with the quirks and problems, others may not be able to so easily.
