Frustrated by the state of things

You’re right and @geko is right on point, I am wondering too why the silence? Is not like the lights don’t dim, there is a conflict between local and cloud. Heck, if they didn’t have a fix, why not letting people know at least. If I knew that the Smart Lighting was the problem, I would not have torn down my whole system looking for that custom app or device that’s causing the instabilty, when the issue was right in front of my eyes.

I am going to gain some clarity on this for you guys tomorrow and report back my findings.

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Many of the people posting on this and the other larger thread have logged tickets with ST support. However, they have been very slow in getting back to us on recent issues. I’ve been with ST for a while and have logged a number of tickets. In the past, support has been much more responsive. For me, part of the reason for posting is not just to vent but to provide and gain additional insight from the community.

I would recommend that if you find this thread useless please mute it.

Regards.

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I bet the folks most frustrated, like myself, are actually trying to develop on the platform.

If I was just a user I don’t think I would mind so much. Once in a while something doesn’t work.

But as a developer I find it impossible to work on this platform. For example my ZXT-120 device I have at my desk has stopped working. This is 1 of 5 ZXT-120’s I own, the other 4 are on a V2 hub at home, this one is on a V1 hub at work. This device is the only one of the 5 that I also used “Learning Mode” to learn my IR codes. I just implemented this code but it was working for a few weeks before it stopped.

My problem is debugging this is almost impossible on such an unstable environment. At any time while I am trying to debug this the System is dropping logging messages, ignoring scheduled tasks, randomly polling, code changing daily which may require changes in my device or may just be buggy, etc

So I am curious if you disagree with me and think this system is stable. Are you developing Devices and/or Smart apps ?

I suspect this might be the crux of the issue and perhaps ST can establish some way to work closer wit developers that are supporting their product.

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^^ This.

I’ve got a few things I’d like to work on but haven’t just because of various platform issues.

My text-to-speech project is on hold. The TTS functions are now working just fine for me (ask Alexa - she took the brunt of it on Live Code Friday) but they’re still not entirely fixed and more changes are coming. I’m not about to start developing against something I KNOW is going to change when even the stuff that’s not breaks seemingly at random and without warning.

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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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