Everything works. Am I wrong?

General Discussion
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Hi guys,
I’m new at this. Just bought a Samsung TV which came with built-in SmartThings hub and fell into this smart home rabbit hole.

I’ve been trying read and learn everything from discussion forums and Youtube videos. Most what I read, is negative, people complaining how nothing works. I have a completely different experience. SmartThings seems to be pretty flexible and I was even able to get cheap unsupported Nedis zigbee switches to work with Mariano drivers I found here.

Has ST developed a lot recently or why do I feel so positively surprised about it?

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There is a gap between “everything works” (title) and “nothing works” (what you read).

I’d say the issue is more about reliability, this comment expresses it well:

I try to stay away from cloud integrations and cloud-based stuff like the app itself, so mostly use automations and Matter devices, they’re local and pretty stable. But there’s been indeed episodes every few months when something breaks, so I always remember that phrase from @JDRoberts.

Then there’s the missing features, would you consider not being able to do something as “doesn’t work”? I enjoy squeezing the features of Matter devices but not even a simple “increase brightness” action is available in SmartThings unless you make your own custom driver. Same goes for light fading (transitions). Probably not a deal-breaker for many, if I didn’t know how to make drivers I would probably be using HA already which has those features, but even HA has its issues too so… :sweat_smile:

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I’m using SmartThings for the last 7 years !!
Everything works with Hub V2 and I keep adding devices from time to time.
I’m using Zigbee and Z-Wave devices only , no WiFi devices at all. All the automation works flawlessly even those which created 7 years ago. In addition I’m using @joshua_lyon Sharptools integration to create Dashboards and even more complex automations.
I have no knowledge when it comes to edge drivers but I understand how HW works. SmartThings is the easiest for me

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Welcome to SmartThings @Antti_Kalpio
I have been using SmartThings with a second-hand V2 hub for over 4 years.
I have slowly and carefully been selecting and adding Zigbee and Z-Wave devices over that time.
I say ‘slowly and carefully’ because I believe home automation is not quite plug and play and you need to select devices that you believe will work or are prepared to put the effort into finding or developing Edge drivers for them. My goal is to have everything locally executed.
I personally stay away from WiFi, cloud integrated, or (in the short term) Matter devices. But that is just personal.

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Come back in six months and let us know how you feel. :wink:

as others have said, I don’t think it’s a matter of “nothing works,“ or “everything works.“

SmartThings is a very sophisticated, very flexible system whose developers have always prized versatility over reliability.

So no matter how much you like your system now, even if you are running everything locally and only using matter, the odds are pretty high that something the smartthings developers do in the next six months will break something that had been working great for you up until then. :anxious_face_with_sweat: and that’s when the frustration sets in.

I do like the SmartThings platform. (I bought my first SmartThings hub more than 10 years ago, and I’m still here.)

but because home automation is not just a fun hobby for me, but an essential part of my daily life, I have gradually moved all of my mission-critical use cases off of smartthings and onto other platforms that prioritize reliability above versatility. I get fewer features and (up until matter) less device choice, but something that worked on Monday would continue to work on Tuesday for a very long time. That’s just never been true of SmartThings.

So I’m glad you’re enjoying it, and there’s a lot to like. I hope your system continues to function well for you. But the real test of smartthings is, as I mentioned in the old post that @mocelet mentioned, the Maintenance Free Operating Period. The length of time a SmartThings setup will run smoothly without requiring additional unexpected hands-on adjustment. I hope yours will be long and trouble free. But just in case the day does come in the next few months when something suddenly stops working, don’t spend a lot of time on it by yourself. First come to this forum and see if it’s something that other people are experiencing too. You can save yourself a lot of time and effort, because with smartthings, it’s hardly ever just you. :man_shrugging:t2:

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Case in point: I installed a matter outlet 8 months ago and it randomly went offline last week. So I used the flip the breaker trick to bring it back online, which worked; however, after power cycling a separate sensor with a known driver/firmware issue, that one stopped responding, so I had to use the swap the driver work around to get it working. It all works now, but only because I had to manually intervene…

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Am I actually the only one for whom everything has worked perfectly right from the start? And that’s with a three-digit number of devices - some of them quite exotic. No failures (except maybe with the app), no noticeable latency, no strange behavior.

Most of the devices are Matter, and almost all of those are Thread.

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I have the same experience. Not sure ‘absolute reliability’ is even achievable, or desirable. You have a choice, just like with most engineered things. You can get a Tonka Toy which is reliable and works out of the box - but you can’t modify it. Or, you can get an Erector Set that let’s you customize to your heart’s content. But, reliability is now YOUR responsibility.

Over ten years ago I started with Iris from Lowe’s. Bought ST before it was Samsung. I learned early on that once you start cobbling devices and software together to ‘push the limits’ of their intended use, then you have wandered into uncharted territory. Read this forum, but start with the oldest threads and you’ll soon see that users wanted to customize with other software and programming but wanted the makers/programmers to still guarantee ‘reliability.’

I use a Samsung phone and am very pleased with the ST echo system and I consider it quite dependable. IMHO

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I never said, or expected, “absolute reliability.”

I use a standard engineering term which is applied to consumer goods like dishwashers, thermostats, blenders, etc: MFOP. “Maintenance free operating period.”

This is the length of time the device is expected to function without requiring user intervention.

and as I also mentioned, for home automation, my preference is for a minimum 6 months MFOP.

I do keep maintenance logs (engineer, here :wink:), and I do get that easily from most of my home automation systems, including Hue, Lutron, Aqara, Switchbot, Amazon Echo, 3rdReality, Ring Security (zwave), Apple Home, Flic, and even a Tuya hub.

in almost 15 years, I have yet to get it from SmartThings.

sometimes the fix is “easy:” do something simple in the app, pop the batteries, reboot the device, etc.

The issue for me is that as someone who is quadriparetic I have to pay another person to do all those “easy“ fixes. So I am probably much more aware of them than most people. But the forum is full of posts from people who say “This has been working for months/years, and now it doesn’t.” Sometimes for entire model lines, like some Samsung televisions.

So I agree, absolutely: “absolute reliability“ would not be an appropriate goal for a consumer product. But I do think an MFOP of six months is.

if you’re getting that from your SmartThings set up, I’m very happy for you. I look forward to the day when I get it from mine, but I’m not holding my breath.

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That’s my experience too, especially after automatic firmware updates that you can’t choose when to update and may happen at inconvenient times. Now they’re usually way more smooth though, having to power-cycle or even pair something again wasn’t that unusual.

I’m not counting issues during the beta testing period since those come with the territory and I’m happy to be able to catch some before they reach the rest of the users.

These are some episodes during this year from the top of my head:

  • January. We started the year with the nerfed webhooks with 24-hour tokens instead of 50 years, announced with only a few days in advance and in holiday season. That got many people upset, especially Home Assistant users that wanted to integrate with SmartThings and were two months without being able to. Also, calling SmartThings routines from Tasker or Macrodroid just got harder and requires external web services and complex setup when it was just a HTTPS call.
  • May. Control of lighting groups in the app was broken for me and other users, took some weeks to fix. Not a big deal in my case since I’ve always used SmartThings for the local automations and have plenty of alternatives for locally controlling lights (buttons, vendor apps, etc), but another user would say “again, nothing works!”.
  • August. A bug in Matter drivers made all the lights and plugs of some users meeting the conditions unusable since the driver would crash. I didn’t experience it because I was using my own drivers but helped reporting it since I could replicate it. They fixed it within the day since it was quite urgent.
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