Oh that’s easy … I’m always right. 
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Not one of the press reviews actually use ANY of the cloud based HA systems. They play with it for a couple of days at their office and write their puff piece.
We don’t have real journalists anymore out there, all of them are bloggers that simply write what they are told to write.
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Yup… It’s a lot easier to copy a press release than actually research and test.
This explains why all the gadget crowdfunding campaigns have dozens of media logos in their description sections, and all those publications write the same thing in the same tone:
This gadget will change our lives and is shipping next month. It’s available for “pre-order” today on Kickstarter / IndieGogo!
Always neglecting to mention that crowdfunding is not a store, that only prototypes have been built, and that similar gadgets are a year behind schedule…
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And that you are going to get your product in 6-12 months. And that it doesn’t guarantee a good quality product. And that you’ll most likely won’t find good support on it. And that there are definitely going to be delays with the product production. And… well I can go all day on this subject.
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Agreed.
I have backed around 2 dozen projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo and so far only 3 have shipped on time (hoping for a 4th to make it this month!). But @tgauchat is right about crowdfunding not being a store (despite the fact that a lot of the projects these days are treating it that way).
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I knew I jinxed it yesterday saying my stuff was working. My heat failed to turn off again this morning. What a waste running all day with nobody home. I just can’t rely on this junk product.
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At this point, it’s not a set and forget system.
I still check up on my stuff once I get to work to make sure my mode changed and everything turned off accordingly. SmartTiles makes it easier at least.
I can’t check the status of my AC because it is an IR sender with no feedback ZXT-120. So no way to know if it worked.
If I have to go check it every day I might as well just toss Smart Things and simply push the button every morning. Home “Automation” my buttocks… 
Alexa is responding fine this evening but my hub is ignoring any commands even from the app. Guess I will try a reset.
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My Hub V1 is working just fine. I had a very momentary outage (a couple minutes?). No manual reboot or any other intervention required.
In other words: Being an early adopter of a piece of hardware from an unreliable company isn’t a great consumer decision.
This is not directed at you, Ron, but rather the hundreds of people that endlessly day in and day out begged for the release of Hub V2 (1817 posts in just one of the Hub V2 begging Topics…):
And later in the same Topic I wrote:
May 18, 2015…
I would rather heartily recommend patience though, even after release: Don’t rush to be an “early adopter” of the new platform.
If you’ve got time to be a Beta tester (or post-Beta … Gamma (?!) tester), then early adoption is a great service to the Community and hopefully you have a smooth experience with personal benefits.
But there will be a period of time after Hub V2 is in the wild that it could be less stable than Hub V1 (gasp!). Existing Hub V1 customers will have to go through a migration process to Hub V2, and it would be sad to see a lot of folks jump into this and then a rash of Community postings saying “Help! I wish I could rollback!!!”.
BTW: I’m always right.
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Had not even a momentary outage on the locally processed automations using the v2 hub. Can your v1 do that?
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Nope…
But… I’ve not had to spend the hours I would need to migrate from Hub V1 to V2, and the hours I know that you have spent figuring out how to debug the poltergeist behaviors you experienced due to Smart Lighting local vs cloud execution quirks. I haven’t touched Smart Lighting. Don’t want it … and without Hub V2, I’d get very little benefit from it, so I’m glad I’m avoiding the complication.
My Hub V1 based SmartThings overall outages rate is about the same or better than pre-Hub V2 was released.
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Oh c’mon, you will have a migration tool in few weeks, so that wouldn’t be a problem. And I know you like to pull all nighters to test things, so why not joining the real fun. You may even be selected amongst the fortunate few to volunteer your time to a group of elite beta testers 
Oh Bobby … I hope we meet one day so we can have an entire day of mutual laughter! 
You forgot the little “TM” marker after “in a few weeks”! Migration tool was explicitly and with no qualifications promised by SmartThings’s Twitter representative as well as the CEO himself: “By the End of The Year”. … Does that need a “TM” too?
Did they explicitly state calendar year?
When does the SmartThings fiscal year end?
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the thing is the hardware is actually very solid. I am impressed with the hub bot the V1 and V2 have very solid designs.
It’s the firmware and the server software that is the failure. and it’s all because they want to trade system complexity for user simplicity in programming. And you really can not do that in Home Automation because everyone needs something different.
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I agree. I believe that user simplicity should be sacrificed for firmware reliability and OUTSTANDING system documentation.
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No trade needed. I believe the current system could be made reliable with work and no user sacrifice.
Two failures in the last two days.
- Yesterday garage door was left open overnight but ST never reported that it was left open. I have it configured to report if left open for more than 30min which used to work fine.
- Heat failed to turn off on schedule again this morning.
I really don’t know what to do with this thing anymore. It really only works as a manual control of devices from phone and as a device to check status of things manually. Reporting of condition and taking actions automatically is random at best. So sad because before they rolled out the “New improved v2” everything worked fine.
I deleted the smart app which was configured to alert when the door was left open and now I can’t find it again to reinstall. Does anyone know where they moved this door left open notification smart app ?
It might be gone. You can use Rule Machine to do it, with a simple trigger.
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Thanks, I will check it out. I think I might just write my own. I don’t want a complicated app that tries to do everything. That was what I originally loved about ST V1, every thing I wanted to do was done in a simple to install single purpose smart app which I could easily understand and easily tweak the code if I wanted slightly different behavior. The new apps are attempting to do everything and I think that is a huge mistake.
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