Duplicate devices in alexa app

Devices & Integrations
1

The other day I noticed that when i go into the alexa app on my iphone, and tap on smart home to see a list of my devices, all of my hue bulbs show up twice.

if i tap on one of the devices and then tap on edit, one says “connected via Smartthings” and the other says “connected via Hue Hub”

I used to have both the smartthings and hue skills enabled on my echo devices, but once i noticed these duplicated, I removed the Hue skill and I removed the duplicate devices that were connected via hue hub.

however a few days later, when viewing my devices in the alexa app, I noticed that the duplicated devices are back.

Has anyone else experienced this? If so, how can i permanently remove the duplicate hue devices from my alexa app?

2 Likes
3

thanks - that works but i would really love to actually remove them. the reason is that when I go to create groups in my alexa app, it still displays the duplicate devices making it hard to know which is which.

5

First you need to do this:

  1. Open the Alexa Amazon SmartApp under Automations/SmartApps in SmartThings Mobile app and turn off the option to allow Alexa to discover all SmartThings devices (allow Alexa to access all devices option as shown below). Then select all of the devices that are only in SmartThings that Alexa didn’t discover from other 3rd party apps. This is key to do first.

Screenshot_20180126-113055
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  1. Open https://alexa.amazon.com from a browser, not the Alexa App. If you are doing this on a mobile phone and Chrome for example, after you login, you need to change options to select Desktop site so it doesn’t redirect you to your Alexa App or login on a laptop/desktop to do this.

  2. Then forget all SmartThings Devices.

  3. Then you can run discovery in Alexa again and she will only bring in SmartThings devices you manually selected to be discovered in number one above.

Definitely don’t disable them. There is no reason to have duplicate devices in Alexa. This could also cause potential confusion for Alexa when SmartThings goes down and she is looking for devices and gets lost seeing multiple devices with the same name, offline or not. Removing them removes any negative scenario from potentially happening.

Whallah!

3 Likes
6

that works - thank you!

1 Like
7

Not sure if anyone is monitoring this as it’s a bit dated. Could you accomplish the same thing by disabling the device skill thats causing the duplicates.

Example all my duplicates appear to be because ST and Hue Hub. If I disable Hue skill will that work too rather than go through all the stuff above?

9

Why do I not have alexa in my smartthings app?

10
11

I actually had my Hue lights listed 3 times and I finally figured out why.

I had a Hue hub, and Harmony Hub, and Alexa all connected to each other. This caused a very vicious circle. My set up looked something like this:

Hue <<>> Smartthing
Hue <<>> Harmony
Hue <<>> Alexa
Alexa <<>> Harmony
Alexa <<>> Smartthings

Note: if you have Hue and Harmony connected, you will pull in lights from Harmony as well (the dreaded 3rd device).

You really should only need to hook Hue to Smartthings and then Smartthing to Alexa. When you are done you should only have these connections:

Hue >> Smartthings
Harmony >> Smartthings
Alexa >> Smartthings

Basically you want your Smartthings hub to be the center of everything and then feed that out to Alexa.

If you connected everything to each other in a vicious circle like me, you would think that removing the Alexa skills for Hue and Harmony would solve the issue but it doesn’t. For some reason when you remove the Hue Skill from Alexa it doesn’t actually get removed.

TO FIX this you need to access your Hue control panel on a computer here:

https://account.meethue.com/apps

Once here, delete all the connections from Hue to Alexa, and if you also allowed Harmony to connect to Hue you may want to delete that as well. If you actually use your Harmony remote to control your lights you could leave that connection but you may need to limit what Harmony shares with Smartthings using the process described above.

ALSO NOTE: I was also seeing this happen with my other devices like Wemo Switches. If I connect them to Both Smartthings and Alexa they were duplicated. Just something to keep in mind. Again, you want Smartthings to be the center of everything, and feed that to Alexa.

I sure hope this helps someone else. I know my OCD was really kicking in when I would see these duplicates in Alexa, as well as half the time I would get the device offline messages from Alexa but it would actually work.

Good Luck!!

3 Likes
12

I have same issue with wemos, alexa sees them and i dont have the wemo skill setup in alexa. I use smathings to conect all my devices. My work around is to rename them but im slowly dumping all my wemos.

13

I’m in the process of this now. Alexa is very invasive and will find compatible devices within seconds of being added to your network in some cases. I try to use the original manufacturer skill if they’re available and disable them in the Smartthings to Alexa integration.
WeMo has such a poor skill that this isn’t feasible. I’m replacing all my WeMo plugs this weekend.

14

Hi, i have a similar issue, all my devices are doubled, however i never installed an Alexa ‘Smart App’ in the smarthings app i just connected them using the Alexa skill in the Alexa app. Do i just skip step one and do the rest of them?

15

Ignore this i saw the updated instruction link above. Thanks

17

I don’t agree with that, you’re slowing things down. Why go though two clouds, when the device will operate quicker going from one to Alexa