Merged this topic with another so commiseration can happen together.
We are working on these issues but additional threads along the same vein aren’t productive.
So there are known issues?
Is there a list of them somewhere? Something like that would at least help us understand where the issues are and stop banging our heads against the wall trying to troubleshoot them on our own. Maybe list them on http://status.smartthings.com/?
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I agree that the venting posts such as mine aren’t productive. I think what might help is a small glimpse into what plans are being executed to stabilize the platform…ie “we’re changing the scheduler infrastructure this summer, improvements hopefully this fall”. That would at least give me a warm and fuzzy that better days are on the horizon for the platform and I can grin and bear it for a bit.
Like I had originally posted, when working, it really should be an amazing platform.
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There is also a huge thread regarding issue tracking that we’ve all been asking for along with accountability as far as this happened at this time and this is how we fixed it. Would really like a how we’re going to prevent it from happening again column. 
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Welp…I’ll be honest, until today I hadn’t seen any posts on the forum. I just got my starter kit, so everything is still a bit new to me. Being someone who’s been on both the business management side of things as well as sales, your most important task (for ST) is to gear towards the newest person. So far, I’m semi-pleased. But I’ve got a few complaints…and it’s my first day with this.
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The app is confusing, it’s just too cluttered, I love the extra features it has, and they’re needed, but they’re too spread out.
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Why can’t I automatically set my mode to ‘away’ mode when I leave my apartment? This is something I shouldn’t have to manually change or configure, especially with a smart home automation system.
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I couldn’t connect my philips hue lights to smart things, that doesn’t matter since both are on IFTTT so I can still connect them, but that was frustrating. It just doesn’t see my hub when every other app does.
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I should be able to set a radius for the geofence for my personal presence device.
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You should offer more deals more often.
I love smart things, your customer service department is hands down amazing, KEEP IT THAT WAY, but you’ve got to live up to the hype. If there’s a huge laundry list of complaints, then guess what? Get off your butt and provide status updates, deliver patches and fixes, actually DO something about them. As far as I’ve read here on this thread, it seems like complaints and bug reports are being made and nothing is being done about them. ‘Soon’ isn’t an answer. You need to set deadlines on these and make those deadlines available to the community. That’s the only way you’re going to gain the trust back from these folks.
You can do this.
Next to change mode there is a gear that will allow you to create an action that changes the mode when you leave.
Open the side nav by tapping the menu next to home, then the gear at the top right, then tap to edit your home location. You can move the pin and re-size the geo fence.
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I second #1 but hear there’s big new changes on the way to alleviate that so you have that to look forward to.
And there’s a lot of posts about using your phone to tell ST when you’re away, my biggest tip if you’re using your phone as a presence sensor is never turn your wifi off if you have an iPhone.
And yeah… this stuff is expensive. I want more but can’t justify it yet… And I don’t want to bother my friends with my socially awkward because things work just fine without being smart hobby by signing them up.
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Thanks guys, this is all very helpful! I unfortunately don’t have any friends who are into buliding smart homes. I don’t know if you saw a post I made earlier, but I’ve already setup an actual voice activated and controlled artificial intelligence (simulated obviously) and have been able to even connect it to teamspeak so I don’t have to spend a ton of money on sonos and can just get some simple speakers and a smart phone (only needs internet, not phone capability) and with eventghost and IFTTT just about everything I need to connect is connected. I’m going to have to learn how to do some scripting to get some things to work that normally wouldn’t, but I think think it’s possible.
Yes we’re approaching the end if things do not improve dramacatly in the next month I am done. To many issues and spent to much time to make it work. Come on guys get it stabilized already!
For Christmas. Womp womp.
Unfortunately, threads like this one are a constant feature of ST. It never works for more than a day or two as people expect it to, and eventually someone gets very frustrated and starts an “I’m fed up” thread. Also, unfortunately, people tend to believe that ST is going to pull a rabbit out of the hat called Hub V2. Dream on. Whether or not Hub V2 solves anything that’s wrong is completely unknown at this point, but history would suggest that it will not solve these problems. It should be pretty clear that the platform is fragile, subject to all sorts of problems and failures, almost on a daily basis. A new hub will probably add to those problems, not resolve them. All of us wish that ST was a stable reliable platform, but it isn’t.
However, hope springs eternal…
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As I mentioned already in the past, to me this is an architectural issue. As long as every zwave/zigbee event/command needs to be routed to/triggered by the cloud platform for processing, I can’t imagine the platform can ever reach stability when a decent number of users, each of them with a decent number of devices and applications, is using it; it just doesn’t scale.
I have no idea how Hub V2 is designed, and/or how it will interact with the cloud platform; but if at some point ST releases a hub which is able to run ST apps locally, and process events locally, and go back to the cloud only for specific services which do require the platform, then I would believe the system would have a chance of working reliably and smoothly; you would still have bugs and defects, but it would be architecturally sound.
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If If If, If ST did things soundly, it would be sound. But it isn’t. Certainly we can all hope for something stable and reliable, but there is no evidence AT ALL presently to support that hypothesis. I’m just saying this because faced with the fact that ST is neither stable nor reliable, everyone is pegging their hopes on vapor ware.
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Architectural issue yes, as to a cloud implementation not scaling, I have to disagree.
There’s plenty of OLTP systems that are able to deal with way more data than ST is pushing around.
Lets WAG some numbers:
avg 50 devices per customer
each device issues a status update once every 300 seconds
50/300 = .1 transaction/second
ok, those updates cause an average of 10 cascading events each, so now we’re at 1 transaction/second
so 1 tps * 20K users = 20k tps
Say I’m off by 100% somewhere along the line, ok now we’re talking 40k tps.
That’s a sizable load, but completely doable with distributed cloud systems/services.
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I don’t know what devices you have; but my movement, temperature sensors probably average one message every 60 seconds; without considering that I need to poll thermostats every 4 minutes to get up to date readings - which involves bursts of a dozen commands in one direction, and a dozen events back for each of them. I would estimate your numbers are about 1000% off.
That said, clearly the ST architects do agree with you…
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[quote=“minollo, post:37, topic:13260”]I would estimate your numbers are about 1000% off.
That said, clearly the ST architects do agree with you…
[/quote]
Regardless of who’s estimate is right, V.2 is supposed to alleviate this by performing many of the functions internally vs. sending to the cloud. Personally, I think about 90-95% of what I do with my setup could be handled with V.2 as it been described.
However… Bruce is 100% spot on:
Until we see something concrete and see an actual release date… it’s all vaporware. (Not vaporware in the sense that it will never come… only that it doesn’t exists until we can see it.)
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ST was never super rock solid but been quite usable in the past. But the constant stream of ‘problem detected - solved’ email notices and my lights and sensors malfucntioning makes me think that its core cloud service is really in early beta. I was going to jump on to v2 hub especially if it supports HomeKit, but now I’m debating whether I should just ditch the platform because I don’t have confidence that they nailed their software. The mobile app is still convoluted mess with no user friendly web interface, but now they are busy integrating samsung smartwatch that nobody uses.
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Yea the amount of entries is troubling but lets not scare ST away from being forthcoming with this information. I would rather know that I’m not going crazy and see the problem as known that hush hush secrets.
That being said… the problems are too frequent…
Nothing is certain, but although there was initial discussion of possible HomeKit integration, ST staff later said in the forums that after more details came out about how bridges would work in HomeKit it was unlikely that ST would pursue HomeKit integration.
A lot of nonApple companies said the same thing in late January, btw. Back in September 2014, initial Apple announcements made it sound like other hubs like ST and Iris could work with HomeKit. But by January, details on required security protocols torpedoed most of that. Bridges can only control 100 devices, cannot include doorlocks, garage doors and some other high security devices, and must be mfi certified.
So the third party bridges that will be HomeKit compatible now look likely to be limited to lighting bridges like Hue and some HomeKit specific bridges (that right now only Insteon has signed up for).
We won’t know until everything actually come to market, but that seems to be the current trajectory.