Frustrated by the state of things

I’m just a user, not a developer, and could not possibly be more frustrated. :rage:

3 days last week I had to call a neighbor to let me out of my own house because the automated lock controls didn’t work. (We’re now moving lock control to a nonST controller.)

Read this thread: the frustration isn’t limited to coders.

When things that work on Monday fail on Tuesday, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a coder or not. It’s frustrating.

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Been seeing scheduling issues for two years+, and it’s getting worse. Now my garage door device handler is hosed, and I have been waiting over a month to get motion sensors addressed after support’s suggestion totally hosed it, and created something I can not delete.

As for bug reports… I have actually been asked to stop sending them in as they are overwhelmed.

As for those with no issues, great… guessing you’re not doing much with code. Even then, plenty of people not coding still having regular issues (otherwise support wouldn’t be run over, right?).

The slowness of support is due to the number of issues. Its an explanation, not a fix. We are trying to catch up but when you release buggy software, turns out you end up having more support tickets. This is a condemnation of our whole organization not one group.

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One word then… ROLLBACK

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Or better yet: Provide the solutions–tell us what’s being done, and prove it.

@Ben only stated what we already know.

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So now it has been over 1 full year since the “big crush (database overload) and apologies of October 2014”.

It’s actually kinda hilarious that the Forum doesn’t show a date on the embedded quote, 'cuz I bet many folks could easily believe it was written within the last few days…

Everything deserves perspective. Well, it’s hard to have a positive perspective on this. Or have an honest attitude that doesn’t reflect the limits of patience:

In one year, SmartThings has made ill advised international expansion while many major domestic issues persist and while deployment practices continue to be disruptive (buggy) and not conservative (insufficient isolated QA testing). ST deployed Hub V2 which planned to significantly offload cloud load and dependency, but with these features not enabled, thus further deferring the product’s scalability whilst continuing to add customers faster than their ability to support them.

“Frustrated” is the appropriate emotion, I believe. :confounded:

Still appreciate @ben’s frank apologies, though. Clearly this is a organizational issue that many good people are putting sincere effort into resolving. But individuals can’t fix something this complex and growing. Where is the decisive strategic leadership to pull this train wreck back onto the rails?


(ok… I’m being quite dramatic. Might lighten the mood?.. Back in October / November 2014 I really thought this Anniversary would be a much happier occasion…).

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While mea culpa is admirable, I think is as useful as our venting. No one here, I don’t think, wants ST to fail. Most of us here understand that maybe forces beyond your control forced an early release of a product that wasn’t ready for prime time.

We are not looking for a magic fix that would be deployed overnight, but we are asking for help to avoid frustrating user experience. If we would know or be aware of some of the bugs, we would work around issues so your team can concentrate on fixing them. Heck, many here would jump in and help as we have done in the past. SmartThings has opened doors (and eyes) for things that were not possible just a few years ago. We want to grow like a family, just let us!

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Honestly, this part I don’t get. When the founders complain about organizational issues within organization they’ve created themselves, it sounds a bit fishy to me. Or does the “organization” refer to the corporate overlords? If so, what about the claims that SmartThings would continue to operate as an independent entity after the acquisition?

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Nope. It’s on me, and Alex, and Andrew, Jeff, all of us. We are taking steps to make sure we improve. SmartThings is in charge of it’s own destiny and we need to right the ship.

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Exactly, If ST just posted a list of known issues that was more detailed we could know what to avoid while trying to work with the system. But instead the status page usually says everything is fine. In fact it should have said “Polling doesn’t work” for over 1 year now, Scheduled Tasks are getting ignored about every other day, We released an app with a bug we fixed in the last version on several occasions, etc. Stop acting think things are fine when they are not. You are likely to lose sales but it would be deserved and honest.

Polling is a great example. I have received several different suggestions from support about polling not working which makes me wonder if ST even knows that it doesn’t.

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:arrow_double_up: This.

And we are currently in a partial outage not shown.

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I can greatly appreciate this candidness, but in my IT department (large hospital system in a big city), if we had this many issues, we would have had several post mortems, lessons learned, and would have probably locked our critical team in a room, until we had a solution to announce.

So, definitely appreciate it @Ben but, what has been or has not been working so far? What is being done to help appease the community? The issue purely isn’t support, there are many threads stating lots of concerns. From lack of proper dev support, poor communication to devs, on and on. I am sure your well aware, and its great knowing your browsing the forums… But I really think that to keep many incredible power users, including many in this thread… your going to have to change the game… quickly.

Any input into your thought process so far, would be greatly welcome.

I agree. Everything is not “ok” if polling and scheduled tasks are not consistently working (or working at all). Very true. To say something is “fine” to me, I now turn around and ask to define what “fine” is.

Actually they need to do a “stable” and “testing” branches and let users subscribe to “testing” and understand that it will break constantly but they are helping test instead of the current everyone is a beta tester method of operation.

Sadly it seems all cloud based companies cant afford to have two sets of servers in order to keep profit margins high.

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@Ben,

I truly wish it didn’t take something like this for you to come around the forums these days, but definitely appreciate you doing so.

That said, as Terry pointed out above, we’ve been hearing variations on this theme for well over a year now. In that time I’ve watched multiple long-time community members go from die-hard proponents to extreme cynics. Some have stopped posting. Others have left entirely. Many are waiting to jump ship as soon as a viable alternative exists. The absolute best thing that SmartThings has right now is its community, and it’s beginning to erode.

A ship-righting doesn’t happen overnight whether it’s technical, political or organizational. Please take this opportunity to tell us what the plan is. Include us. Heck, can we help in any way?

Any technical issues are only exacerbated by a decreased SmartThings presence on the forums. It reads as apathy to the people coming here for help with known issues when the community team goes silent, even if the reason for that silence is that you’re getting your hands dirty behind the scenes to fix things.

So don’t give us dates if you’re concerned about slipping (seriously though… major bonus points if you give us dates and hit them), but break this plan down into bite-sized actions. Tell us the steps you’re planning to take and tell us what successful execution of these steps will look like from our perspective.

Thank you.

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In fact a huge part of my frustration is having heard for almost a year excuses that they can’t fix things because they are working too hard on V2. This would imply that V2 would be better. So my expectation when being told to wait because they were working on V2 was that when V2 was released the “wait” would be over. But alas that was a terrible assumption. We waited and now we wait again for them to fix the very things we have been complaining about all along. Why would you not put scheduled events into the V2 hub side when you know the cloud version isn’t’ working, or at least fix the cloud version. Way too many promises which are rarely delivered and if delivered often too little too late.

I totally agree I always have my ears open for a new hub. VeraLite lost me before my return period ended. SmartThings kept me longer with promises of V2 being better (same mistake VeraLite Made BTW).

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@Ben I know you all are working to resolve the issues. I would say that you need to set a timeline, document the issues, let us know as your customers what the issues are and what the plan is to resolve them. Lack of communication despite all that the community is doing is killing ST. Communication, and indication of a plan and execution of that plan will bring those of us who understand back into the fold. But, I fear that you have already lost many people with the current failings. You need to recover gracefully, and with authority. Right now, I am not seeing that from ST

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If I try and put myself in the ST team shoes, I understand why this has been so quiet for a while:

  1. We released a recent new product and app and things are buggy as hell
  2. We just started retail operations and by the state of things, we’re going to get an awful amount of returns
  3. The retail stores in return will most likely start to rethink the sale of our items
  4. We have a parent company that goes out in public boasting about their HA system, and we know it’s not ready for prime time
  5. Many of our users are about to become pitchfork and torch crowd

I do believe the ST team is working 24/7 on this and going over their limits to try and fix this. The problem is, when you release something SO buggy, it is not an easy fix. I suspect this is going to be a situation that will last for a few months, and it won’t be something that will be fixed in the next couple of weeks. The challenge here will be: will you hold and stay with ST or jump ship?

When this gets fixed (I’m sure it’s when, not if), ST will be a more mature and robust platform. If the WHEN comes sooner than later, it will most likely still survive giving that there are HA options coming out every day. I truly believe the problem here is, to quote Frankie, “they bit off more than they could chew”. Going international, releasing a new hub, promising to the public fixes and new integrations that never came, making a retail jump. That’s a LOT. And I believe their big papa had something to do in all of this, even though they say it runs as a separate company.

Now, all of this doesn’t excuse ST. I’m just trying to understand what is going on, because for the past couple of weeks I’ve been asking myself about everyday why I made the switch from Wink. My Wink hub was reliable but it just wasn’t as powerful and speedy as ST. Every time my wife says something to me not firing, I think of @JDRoberts. I can stand up and turn the switch on, problem solved. He can’t and it is for situations like this that ST should be reliably working, considering they are a 2 year-old company now.

So I guess I am FRUSTRATED with the state of things. I just hope they can win us back, because with every day that I get home and my lights didn’t come home, I find myself drifting away a little bit more from ST. I still have a few sirens and door locks in their boxes because I dare not install them with ST.

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AMEN. Anyone would be crazy to place new “mission critical” devices into operation on ST the way things currently stand. SmartThings needs to wake up to this reality, and articulate a plan… soon.

SmartThings can’t hope to become a viable business entity based on the sale of $99 hubs, even if they lived up to promises and worked perfectly. And very few people are going to buy into their upcoming subscription service if they can’t get the basics working reliably.

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I sincerely hope they do not make the devastating decision to release the paid services before the current hardware and services have a good clean track record.

I plan to stay with ST for the long haul, unless something comes up that provides the same services, flexibility, power, and better reliability. I am not brand loyal by any means. I believe in quality and I’m willing to pay for it (except for Apple! Die Apple!).

But based on the current state, how long it takes for a quality repair, and the track record afterwards, if the paid services are released within 1 year of the first month of stable history, I’m out.

I believe the paid services would kill the company at this point. I will not pay for failure.

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