Frustrated with ST!

@JDRoberts @Edgar_Igor_Tsissar as you both know, (especially JD), ST is a work in progress. I have had locks unlocking before this update, and honestly I have a check in place to relock if that should happen. However, it is still an issue and ST needs to figure out what has destabilized their system. Maybe too many updates in too short of a time, maybe no QA checking? Not sure what the overall issue is, but when JD walks away it is a sad day for ST.

Like I have said in prior communications, ST lack of communication to the customers is what is most upsetting. I think we can call adjust to this, if we know what is wrong and what the plan is to fix the hub,

ST has been owned by Samsung, a multinational consumer electronics corporation, for over a year now. When I buy a Samsung TV, a dishwasher or a fridge, I expect it to work 24/7 as advertised. Last time I checked, there was no warning on SmartThings box, saying “Beware! Work in progress”.

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I bought a product that said “Samsung SmartThings” on the box. It didn’t say “Startup SmartThings”. This is what frustrates people the most.

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Yes, most users who have been on this forum for more that a year have been very patient and forgiving, discounting all the recurring reliability issues as “growing pains” and recognizing the SmartThings has a “potential” to become an excellent HA product. However, after more that two years on the market, an acquisition by one of the largest consumer electronics company in the world and a complete overhaul of both the hardware and the mobile app, this can no longer be an excuse.

We have critical bugs that affect many users that go unfixed for two month and more, we have almost daily reliability issues, we have new bugs introduced with every backend update, we have some mysterious events that no-one can give a reasonable explanation for. We’re in exactly the same quagmire we were a year ago, if not worse. Only this time there’s nothing to look forward to. The V2 has been out for more than two month and made no difference at all.

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I couldn’t agree more. I work for a company that supply capital equipments to Samsung and the expectations they put on us is beyond reasonable so maybe it’s time they get their shit together.

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I still look forward to the future, but I think the future will be next summer when they have to have something to compete with a more robust HomeKit ecosystem. (Which isn’t here yet)

My personal opinion, which I know is unpopular, is that Samsung bought SmartThings not for the technology, and not for the user base. They bought it for the name and the history of good reviews and the ability to keep themselves top of mind with journalists covering the IOT industry. So that two years from now in 2017 when their appliance and home entertainment devices are all IOT capable, they can use the SmartThings name and there will be this long history attached to it showing them as leaders in the space.

Which leaves the original SmartThings management with that amount of time to prove that their product/service is in fact a viable offering moving forward.

Like I said, I know that’s not a popular opinion. It just seems to me to fit the facts about where Samsung (not the SmartThings division) has put its IOT time, money, and energy since the acquisition. And in the conflict between statements from the ST founders saying “we’re not going to release it until it’s ready” and what we saw released timed for the big Samsung keynote speeches.

“Your life is your philosophy” and Samsung’s target market for the last year has clearly, it seems to me, been journalists and industry analysts.

But what do I know? :sunglasses:

But, that’s why i am hopeful. As long as HomeKit was vaporware, Samsung only had to compete on the vaporware level. Something in the field was better than nothing.

Now that HomeKit is becoming a real mass-market product, that puts more pressure on Samsung (again, not the SmartThings executive team) to produce something real that can compete. Or they won’t be winning any IOT product of the year awards for 2016.

I don’t know if that something will have anything to do with SmartThings as we know it today. I do hope it will. And I think we’ll know the answer by summer of 2016.

meanwhile, it just comes down to whether you’re getting enough value out of the existing system for the time and money you’re putting into it. And that calculation is different for everyone.

JMO.

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Respectfully, I disagree. Back in summer 2014, the user base was pretty small. My estimate was no more than 50,000 users, of which only half may have been “active”. Technology, on the other hand, was very promising - a cloud-based service, exactly what all the big wigs were craving for. Besides, Samsung had to show something to investors to counterbalance Apple’s HomeKit announcement and Google’s Nest acquisition. So, based on this, I believe the acquisition was mostly technology-driven.

You’re exactly right that the major outcome of this acquisition was supposed to be integration of SmartThings hub into every 2017 Samsung Smart TV model, so that Samsung can sell all their smart appliances (their biggest money maker) as an integrated Smart Home solution. This means that SmartThings has exactly one year to deliver a product that will potentially be sold to several hundred thousands of non-technical customers every year. Not geeks, not home automation junkies, but regular customers who don’t care about protocols, network topology, polling frequency, device handlers, etc. Can you imagine what it’s going to do to support and how many frustrated customers will be yelling and screaming and demanding a refund?

Or not. We obviously don’t know what Samsung’s strategy is. Putting hub technology into a TV set in and of itself doesn’t mean they would be launching into the existing ST ecosystem. An alternative could be relatively limited functionality available through a connected TV, and not necessarily marketed as “SmartThings”. Think, limited private label (haha, Samsung) subset of ST. As you correctly observe, they certainly didn’t make the acquisition for customer base or revenue model or present financials, or any of the normal acquisition motives.

For all we know, ST could just be a sandbox to shake things out – what works, what is problematic, what is rock solid (hahaha), etc. Use it as a lab, as the leading edge experiment, but not as the main consumer vehicle for [fill-in-the-blanks] some strategy yet to be manifest around Samsung appliances.

Of course, all of this is rank (as in stinky) speculation, not worthy of much thought or dialog.

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Ok, that is it for me.

Last night, I was seating in my living room, maybe 10 feet from the HUB and all of a sudden it shuts down all of the lights and closing my door. I look a the ST app and I see that I have left house! Really? In 5 minutes I have arrived back and door was opened for me, while all this time I have not moved an inch from the couch.
Mind that my wife’s phone was deleted from the system for at least a day, so definitely not her being on my account problem. Good bye DumbThing from Samsung. Maybe I will be back in a year if they get their act together.

This happened to me once. It actually arm my alarm so when the kids started running around the siren went off. I’ve learn not to rely on presense sensor again. I am now trying to build a better presense detection system. I have an ultransonic car detector in the garage now so If the car is parked then ST thinks i’m home. Still trying to figure how I can AND the car detector with the phone as my presense (2 factors presense sensing).

Sorry to tell you this, but its the way technology is moving. There is an trend that has caught on called “Minimum viable product” which is often associated with subscription to an approach called “Agile Development.”

A minimum viable product has just those core features that allow the product to be deployed, and no more. The product is typically deployed to a subset of possible customers, such as early adopters
that are thought to be more forgiving, more likely to give feedback, and able to grasp a product vision from an early prototype or marketing information.

It’s a land rush out there like Oklahoma in 1889. Everyone wants to be the first out there to put intelligence, internet access, etc. into products in hope of grabbing market share. The bugs will be fixed later. As I suggested to you a few days ago, putting things that really have to work like door locks on a system that has reliability issues may not be in your best interest.

And while I have no way of knowing, there may be additional factors at play here. In the summer of 2014 Smartthings was bought by Samsung. That’s probably a good thing overall since it brings a deep pocket to fund development and makes it less likely they will suddenly close the doors and turn your purchases into junk. There can be dark sides to an acquisition, though. Often in these kinds of purchases there are clauses that make some of the payout conditional on meeting certain milestones. You can bet that when discussing the sale the roadmap of future product development was covered, and it is possible that release of the gen-2 hub was written into the contract. Like I said, I have no way of knowing, but if this happened there is a powerful incentive to get the product out the door. The timing seems at least consistent with this, sales of the gen-2 hub beginning in time to ramp up volume production for the Xmas season.

Let me say, though, that I personally am happy with the system. It gives me something I didn’t have before, monitoring for leaks and intrusion that works most of the time (which is better than none of the time since I didn’t have monitoring before). I have some technical experience so I was able to cobble together a workable presence detection using 3rd-party apps on my Android phone, although I understand this isn’t available for a non-technical person.

[quote=“cuboy29, post:41, topic:27324”]
am now trying to build a better presense detection system. I have an ultransonic car detector in the garage now so If the car is parked then ST thinks i’m home. Still trying to figure how I can AND the car detector with the phone as my presense (2 factors presense sensing).
[/quote]If you have an Android phone you can use Tasker and the AutoLocation plugin to figure out where your phone is. Watch the demo at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.autolocation&hl=en, that is what you want to do in order to accurately sense your location near home. Next, set up a virtual switch in Smartthings following any of the several examples here on this site. Use Tasker to turn the switch on and off based on your location, and in turn configure Smartthings to respond to that virtual switch to change modes (home, away, etc). To make the detection in Tasker more reliable, add a clause that only marks you as away if the geofence says you are gone and you are not near your home wifi.

I have an ultransonic car detector in the garage

What product is that? It sounds like something that could be useful as a detector for somebody at the front door. The PIR sensors don’t really work that well outdoors.

I use a two factor system based on two different devices tracking my presence (at this point, one is an ibeacon). Took about 6 months to shake everything out, but it now works well for me. Other community members have come up with other approaches. So it can be done, but takes some work. :sunglasses:

Here’s my project topic if you’re interested.

the ultrasonic detector is something I built with the Spark Photon and one of the ultrasonic range finder. I have a device type that will tell me which car is currently parked in the stall.

Actually, SmartThings does not fit this definition. When Amazon released its Echo to a limited set of customers (by invitation only), it was an MVP. It lacked many features it has now, but it was a fully functional and reliable device nevertheless. This was an example of a well executed MVP strategy.

SmartThings released its product more than two years ago with a wide set of features, most of which didn’t work quite well. Then they’ve added more half-baked features (so called “Labs”) and then broke some more of those that did work. There’s a world of difference between an MVP and a buggy POC. :smile:

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I agree this is what they’re going for and be pushing hard the ST people for it. If you don’t like to spend your time tinkering things, having to install a SmartApp to get things done is a pretty “dumb” idea. This is why non tech-oriented people wouldn’t like ST. If you look at the Samsung products (TVs, phones, tablets, appliances, etc.) they are easy to use. You don’t have to overthink to use them.

Changing the subject, while I comlain about ST I also believe it to be positive to actually acknowledge when it is working. And it has been doing so for the past few days, without a hiccup. I hope it stays that way, but who knows.
Today I finally invited my wife to the ST app and we’ll see how things work. Although the first thing she said when she opened it was: “what do I do with all this?”. My reply: Don’t worry, I have everything set up. That should earn me some points. :wink:

Nest week I’ll be getting my new phone and we’ll see how ST behaves.

So, ST, please continue to behave and I’ll be happy.

I agree with you here, however I was trying to put a more positive spin on my overall negative feelings on ST lately
 I guess that did not work either

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Just as a precaution, make sure you have a comfortable couch. :wink:

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Some of my light switches that used to work don’t work now. Some of my routines and smart apps that worked fine are broken now. It is as I need to completely wipe out the whole ST, exclude and then re-include all of the devices and re-do all of the routines.
ST has not been working for me in the last week AT ALL.

Check this thread out
Does it sound familiar :smile: