Ok…so a lot to unpack here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and give this a shot. Hope it’s helpful.
For background, I’m a SmartThings Sr. Product Manager who’s directly working on the migration efforts and I’m also a long-time SmartThings user with a few locations and 120+ devices at my home including LAN-connected, Zigbee, Z-wave, OCF and BLE. I’ve got devices from a variety of well-known and lesser known manufacturers and I also use WebCore, community DTHs and SmartApps extensively, so I’m definitely invested in this on a few fronts.
Yeah, that’s just not the case. As our VP of engineering mentioned a few weeks ago, we’ve always been an open platform and we have no intention of changing that. What we’re trying to do is balance improving our architecture with supporting a community of advanced users and devs, some of whom have very specialized use cases. At the same time, we know our product can be confusing and hard to adopt for newbies to home automation and IoT. Our motto is “make every home a smart home” and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Regardless of what level you’re at we want you to be able to enjoy the platform and grow with it.
WebCore seems to work just fine for me. I just went into WebCore through the new ST app, added a previously un-added device and then included it in a piston. There appears to be a UI bug that makes it look like devices are not being saved as you’re exiting screens (shows up as a “Do you want to “Discard” or “Cancel”” pop-up) but they’re actually saved. For reference I’m using ST version 1.7.50-21 on Android 10.
I’ve got a few ActionTiles dashboards that I use for testing - they all seem to be working fine. They need a little love from me with some changes I’ve made to my location, but they’re still working.
Yes, we absolutely are, which is one of the reasons I’m on the community frequently and in close touch with our CS and DevRel teams. The community is one of our most valuable resources as a platform and EVERYONE at SmartThings agrees that it’s important we listen and provide features the community wants.
Not really sure where he’s getting this as nobody that you’re talking to in CS is at any of the release planning meetings…
Yes, the IDE will eventually go away, but not before we provide an alternative that provides similar functionality. We’ve previously confirmed this.
I mean…I think all of our personal hygiene has suffered a little through this Covid mess, but “reek” may be a bit of an overreach. And for what it’s worth, Wozniak deserves WAY more credit than he gets.
Seriously though, we’re not trying to dumb the platform down, we’re trying to make it faster, more stable, and cooler than it is today. In doing that, we’re going to have to make some compromises because keeping things the way they are for every single use case on the platform just doesn’t work from an architectural standpoint. We’re trying to simplify and standardize the stuff we can while providing the flexibility needed to accomplish the outcomes the community is most looking for. It’s a balancing act and we know that we’re probably going to lose some people…which frankly really saddens and stresses a lot of us out - we like our users and we want you all to like the platform we work so hard on. But we have to make some changes to keep the platform advancing and keep creating the next cool thing in IoT.
@MaxVonEvil, it sounds like your mind is made up, so all I can say is that I’m sorry we didn’t live up to your expectations, but I hope that you’ll keep us in mind in the future because with some of the stuff we have planned, the next few years are going to be really fun. If you have any questions or want to talk more - feel free to reach out to me via DM.
EDIT: Clearing up two other questions from earlier posts: 1) Virtual switches can still be created through the IDE. I’m a huge fan of these personally and we at ST acknowledge they have a lot of good applications for our more advanced users and 2) migration was rolled out in a few tiers based on specific features that still needed to be brought up to parity in the new app. We looked at which specific locations had those features (while respecting everyone’s PII of course) and held off on migration until they were ready. We know that not everything will be identical to the Classic app and there were some difficult decisions made regarding what were considered as parity features, but we sought community feedback on this and tried to address the vast majority of use cases.