This should help:
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I have not used routines because I donāt have a routine, my job is so unpredictable that if a routine develops I will start looking for another job. I have to say that anytime I struggle to get something to work the way I want I search on the community site or ask tech support and I have been able to get what I want the platform to do. I researched every home automation platforms and this one fulfilled my needs, I hope you can get it back to do all you expect from it.
Wow your the guy that actually created the guide haha looks like I ran into the right person! Thanks!
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Sorry maybe I slightly confused you by what I meant by routines. In the iphone app on the bottom toolbar area, the middle (check looking) button opens up the routines page at which say my āBedtimeā routine will, well supposed to, lock all doors, turn off all lights, turn on all night lights, etc, etc. Back in the day I believe they were instead called modes so unless I am the one confusing myself, the name of these āwhateversā have changed several times.
So in your case, it would almost be perfect with your unpredictable job where as you leave the house or arrive, the routines will be automatically be triggered based on your presence to turn stuff on/off so you just leave the house like you normally would without doing absolutely anything. Thatās how mine was working when it was working great. 
But Iām sure you already knew that and I totally misunderstood you haha!
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Routines used to be called āHello Home Phrases.ā
Modes are still the same.
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Haha JD is the unofficial official answer man. You cannot come or go here without running into him. Or him running into you. 
Heās also the resident āok googleā / āhey siriā. You can get his attention by simply asking a question. No need for āok Smart Thingsā because heās always listening and generally can answer any question.
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Some questions, maybe. 
I Donāt answer any questions regarding coding, since , trust me, groovy and text to speech do not mix. 
But the listening part works great. LOL!
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Okā¦ Iāll say mostā¦ I just love that you always give the full in depth answers and when possible with references.
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I converted over my Z-wave network to use OpenHab instead. I donāt look at these forums much these days, but saw your post in a SmartThings Community Digest email. The release of the new UI was the straw that broke the camelās back for me. In my opinion, I thought the changes to the UI were horrible and were big a step backwards. I actually refused to install it on most of my devices. I was also sick of having custom devices break whenever there was an API update on the back-end, missed sunrise/sunset triggers, the occasional hiccups, and variable response times.
An example of the variable response times would be the door sensor on my back door. I have it trigger an outside light to go on at the back of my house when it is night time. The light would sometimes not go on (because of a missed sunset trigger) or take up to 30 seconds to go on. I wasnāt too proud of my āSmartā house when I would take out the trash and see the outside light finally come on after coming back inside.
I like you was very into SmartThings and would tell everyone about it, but unlike you I jumped ship a lot earlier. To hear from you that the last 4 months have been even worse makes me feel even better about my switch. I was so excited about the V2 hub with its local processing thinking it would make my network much more responsive. I was all prepared to upgrade until I saw the new UI along with all the issues that followed. Not to mention the huge hit it would take setup my Z-wave network again from scratch.
To each his own, but SmartThings is no longer for me. Switching to OpenHab has been incredible. Response times are so quick with the local processing and I can actually see and diagnose any Z-wave issues on my own. I could go on and on of how much I like OpenHab (with some cons as well), but ultimately I love the openness and how I control the updates to my controller. Itās been fun, and I wish everyone else the best of luck with the platform.
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Soooo this is fantastic. Basically I want to take back what I quoted above mentioning that support really isnāt as bad as I thought they are because they really are! I mentioned the support guy that sent me an email immediately was very polite, even said 2 people were working on my case, but he was just bsing me more and more, and where have I ended up today? Absolutely no where, after that email from support I have not heard a single word (complete silence) for 3 days now despite giving them a ton of details about what wasnāt working with my hub. I even sent a follow up email asking them if there was any update yesterday and still no word. This is what we call disgusting and unacceptable service aka exactly what people have always been complaining about for over a year now.
Look I donāt care if your busy or backed up but you should never, I mean never, try telling a customer that we will take good care of you, then leave them with no follow up response for days, even when they send a follow up email checking why they havenāt received a response in days. I hope more customers read this and start reconsidering as this is unacceptable and once something, anything goes wrong, you will feel like your in the dark like I and several other people have. I still havenāt learned my lesson have I. I was actually fooled into thinking, you know what, everything is going to be alright, I will get the hub back up and running.
Looks like you made the right move.
@Ben, @ryanh, @tyler1 ā¦ I presume youāre hearing this?
I know that the Support Team is facing tremendous challenges and is focused on improvement. Butā¦ well, weāve talked about this in detail offline: We donāt have to search much to find very high compliments for them, well deserved.
Yet I fear that more and more Customers are likely to have some degree of dissatisfaction at this critical ācontact & retainā opportunity.
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This morning I woke up and my hub went off line took all day to come back online. Now back online and nothing is responding from the ap. I contacted customer support and got the same thing, they responded immediately saying they would figure this one out! Then nothing back. I am sad to say I had the wink and loved it. Got talked into SmartThings and ever since I got it I have had nothing but problems. Sad. Any ideas what is is wrong with my hub?
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I love it! Iāve used Smartthings 1.0 hubs to monitor 2 homes. The only complaint I had was that SmartApps were unreliable. Aside from that my uptime was 100%. I got around the smart apps by using IFTTT to turn my lights on and off.
Now that I have Smartthings hub v2 everything works flawlessly. I have a complicated setup, have created my own arduino devices and even monitor my energy.
I demand reliability because my 2 houses are hundreds of miles apart and Smartthings is also an alarm system for me.
My impression of ST is that it is a highly reliable quality product and is getting better day by day.
The community is outstanding and so is the customer support.
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Wow, sorry you had or are still going through the same situation as I am haha. Thanks to the community (who are freaking unbelievably amazing by the way and helping me stay with this SmartThings) I decided to send that email off which took a lot from me as I always envisioned it would of course be a complete waste of time from reading other complaints. I even got extremely excited to get that āpracticallyā instant email from the support team like you did, thinking that āHey they really must have turned things aroundā but nope, same as you. That instant excitement quickly turned again into disappointment after days passed.
Letās be honest, I DO NOT expect instantaneous responses nor should anyone, I know everyone is busy, it was just Thanksgiving, Christmas is coming soon so around this time itās probably extremely busy and that is fine. What I DO expect is that I get ātinyā updates on my situation if someone or āapparently in my case multiple peopleā are working on my case. 3 (weekdays - no weekends included) without any word is a bit extreme. Heck, just simply lie to me and say your still investigating, something, anything to let me know you are still looking into it and not just bsing me to keep me quiet by sending off a quick support response, especially due to my previous experiences or distrust in the support team after reading from others.
Can you unfortunately back that up with evidence? Have you ever truly tested the 2 systems or just assuming that itās working. For instance, I have an open/close sensor on a door (which is used for security) which is supposed to send me a message when the door is ever opened. I always assumed it was working perfect until other devices were failing so I decided to test it out manually. I opened the door and what do you know, no message even though the phone app stated the device is now in the open state. Closed it again, then opened it. Same issue. So basically, have you ever manually tested the systems which I would imagine no due to how far they are apart as you just might be suprised at how reliable they may be, or you just have perfect systems and mine just started to go defective several months ago haha! 
I will say that in terms of community, SmartThings has one of the best and they truly are outstanding. I basically see the community doing what the SmartThings team should be doing and Iām sure several others will back that up as well. Some community members in the past have been so freaking awesome that I think they are now even part of the SmartThings team. Although in terms of support being outstanding, I donāt know about that one? What were your experiences with the support team personally?
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I think SmartThings can be best described as a stock on Wall Street: V1 stated as an unknown IPO and quickly rose in value. After a little while, I think V1 was undervalued and deserved a buy rating. V2 has fallen flat in my opinion. Iād now rate it as a hold. If you have it, itās probably worth while waiting it out to see if it gets better. After all, I think the only alternative that may be worthy is wink and they are restructuring from bankruptcy (thatās not an analogy either). If you are in the market though, that hold means donāt buy yet.
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YES, my exact thoughts. I request the dev team management to please pause new/developing projects or features, and please focus like a laser on any/all bug fixes, regardless of priority. Itās ok to miss some milestones. Add a new milestone to fix 500 bugs before moving forward at all. I sincerely say these things. It may be difficult to prioritize many high/urgent bugs, but pick some and knock them out, and grab some more.
My other thought is: is there a QA team present? Is there test case automation running in a test environment to ensure no regressions? There may be inevitable manual test case. Is there a gated build server that runs essential test case automation before a build is allowed to complete? These are just some of the things Iām accustomed to automating constant eye balls on something breaking after a fix was implemented. (perhaps Iām speaking to a large choir, but itās a good reminder).
Additionally, platform up time, stability, and reliability should also be a priority - not working on any new features or new projects. Please. 
Thanks for listening, SmartThings dev team. I still believe in this product.
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This is not a good reminder but an absolute necessity. Many of us with large (or small) software project experience are extremely familiar with what you mentioned in terms of constructing automated unit tests on the newly checked in or updated legacy code which then later whether on each commit/daily/weekly (all), a build for your branch is ran which is then further tested against system wide tests which if a test fails, then the build āshouldā also fail. Iām hoping this is where they should be finding most of there issues as multiple developers are modifying code across the system. Of course, we all know that what I mentioned is just the beginning in terms of automated testing.
I personally find that their approach of what appears to be a focus on new āthingsā slightly insulting when the forums (where I thought I was one of the only ones recently) is overflowing with issues upon issues upon issues and what appears to be support that is not knowledgeable enough or rather able to handle the demands of the issues. I know this is the weekend but this is now almost 6 days and I still havenāt received any more responses from support so yea. Itās becoming a case of if I canāt solve it, then Iām at a complete loss and thatās a big issue for SmartThings. Heck my dad has had a brand new hub for about a year now and hasnāt even opened it yet due to the issues I have mentioned over the years.
But donāt worry, Iām sure they are probably being instructed to work on new features as bug fixes does not ādirectlyā relate to profit and getting new customers to buy in. It only relates to an eventual extreme loss of profits when you piss off a portion of your user-base and they start spreading that to others and then that spreads like wildfire haha so yea!
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Of course there is; itās just not able to function.
They are just not very good at the task; probably due to factors outside their control.
The regression bugs are embarrassing. Iām sure improving QA is as high a priority as anything; the problem as @Sam2b points out ā¦ SmartThings is not able to de-prioritize things like international expansion, in order to increase the relative priority of issues that have been ongoing for 2+ years.
The technology is not rocket science. But firing a rocket is easy. Getting to Mars, however, takes years of very disciplined project management.
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Agree! What I wonder is to what extent do you allow your name to get so tarnished that once you reach that end goal, you are left with very little to hang on to! A bit extreme but thatās what I foresee! Perhaps if that ever occurs, Samsung will take control and force a re-branding because what the heck, everyone does that haha!
Just take a look at the highest rated or viewed threads here. Almost every single one of them are āsystem not workingā, āroutines failingā, āthis breaking or that breakingā. Thatās gotta tell them at least something serious.
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ST is awful in terms of reliability. Todayās issue: One of my hubs stopped connecting new devices. Finally I rebooted the Hub, and now itās adding devices again. Random stuff just breaks all the time. Too much to even try and open support tickets. Iād be opening one a day.
But from what Iāve heard the other solutions arenāt any better. I keep hoping someone will build a stable Z-Wave controller.