aint that the truth 
Woo something wonderful has happened in the past 30 minutes. It may be a fluke but my device screens are loading super fast and not requiring a refresh to get tHe info to display. Iâd better enjoy it while it lasts 
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Just to keep the story going, on Wednesday, a day after I received the response from ST saying to buy their brand motion sensor since one of my Bosh models was showing offline after migrating, I received an email for SmartThings Maintenance - SmartThings Hub 2015 (v2) and 2018 (v3) Firmware Update - 21 October 2020.
After this updateâŠmy Bosch sensor has returned to normal. Hasnât been offline once since.
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Fibaro RGBW controller, using the SmartThings stock DTH (https://github.com/SmartThingsCommunity/SmartThingsPublic/blob/master/devicetypes/smartthings/fibaro-rgbw-controller.src/fibaro-rgbw-controller.groovy), has a White Level slider from 0 - 100% in classic which is completely missing in the new app. How do we get back the white level slider.
Keep in mind this is NOT color temperature (the 2700k - 6500k on some RGBW devices) but white level that goes from 0 - 100%. Apparently this is considered a custom attribute but there have been no updates to this DTH. Will these types of things be updated or do we just not have a way to control white level anymore?
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Are momentary buttons/child devices ever going to work again? Have I missed something in relation to this? Surely on the fix horizon?
1 Like
Iâm glad you asked that. I have a handler with momentaries/buttons in components. They work fine on the details page but were not detected as conditions in Automations (even though IKEA buttons worked with essentially the same code).
Your question prompted me to look again and now they are detected. They arenât displayed the same way IKEA buttons are (i.e. as component names which then pop up attribute values), instead displaying as a list of attribute values without any component names at all.
Life is still messed up though. I use your DTH for momentaries @orangebucket and only one of my buttons looks like a momentary in ST. The other 4 look like remote controls with all the options for Held, Pressedand Toggled (up to 6 times)!
The ST DTH refresh or cache system is broken.
The caching seems to be the least of the problems. I have to add presentation IDs (vids) to several DTHs over the last few months, even though they were working fine without them previously. Some were for things like suddenly claiming they were unreachable, others were for the plain batsh*t mental sort of thing you describe. I now consider it to be risky to not have one.
Please donât take this offensively but using an App to turn on/off a light is not something that I do often. Upgrade to some of those cheap Echo Dots and put them around the house and tell Alexa to do it! Way quicker! Sheâll even remind you that a light has been left on.
Automate everything!!
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No offense, already have about 10 echo and voice automation devices across my primary residence. Unfortunately that isnât the best solution for multiple hubs across 5 different geographically dispersed properties. Bottom line, they had an app that worked well and replaced it with one that is slower and requires greater interaction to accomplish the same degree of usability. If they were selling ads based on page views I guess I could see why theyâd go to a more click heavy UI but outside of that, the app is a downgrade from an end user computing perspective.
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After hours upon hours of time and energy Iâm finally about 90% back to where I was with the old app. There are some positives in the new app but the negatives far outweigh them at this point. I really hope all the time and energy we all put into this will pay off with many of the broken things being fixed.
Here are my complaints and issues Iâm still working on:
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History - parts of days completely missing. Trying to find if an automation ran but then 12 hours of the day in history are GONE. Nothing?!
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Automations are slower than WEBCORE pistons! This one blew me away. I programed two of the exact same light switches⊠One with a WebCore piston and another with an ST Automations. The web-core piston had less lag and was almost always faster but occasionally the same speed. Never slower.
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I also did a test above with Smart Lighting. And to no surprise it was the fastest method since itâs local based where everything else is cloud as I understand it.
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Ability to see members presence as a device. I found a work around but this was a glaring omission!
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It would seem any engineer would admit that having to make all these additional virtual switches to get the same functionality as previous app is a big step backwards. Does it work? Yeah, but why not have the automations have additional ability to avoid this stupid work around.
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Speaking of automations and scenes. Why canât 1 automation fire another automation? Why canât a scene running FIRE an automation? Again, you can find work arounds using virtual switches but we are again⊠moving backwards.
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They need to add a history tab for automations and scenes just like they have for devices.
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Itâs been said many times, but we a way to see what devices are part of what Smart apps, scenes and automations. Just add another tab that shows what itâs part of. When replacing devices you have to go through everything to find where that device was being used. Make it easy for us like it was within the old app (yes I did find that IDE shows where itâs being used).
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Automations â need more options. Also, need additional logic for contact sensors. Contact OPEN is not the same thing is CHANGED to open.
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Automations - no way to select button number for my GE switches. Smart lighting allows me to select it but automations does not.
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Smart Lighting - add a TOGGLE option instead of just turn on/turn off. If you manually control a light lets say with a physical switch but also want to button to control that switch you have to use webcore or automations (cloud based) and canât use smart lighting. Smart lighting doesnât know what the current state of the switch is (or doesnât care) and just does the opposite of what it did before (ON vs OFF for example). So in my case I have to push my button twice for it to do what I want. This has always been the case for Smart Lighting but kind of annoying.
Thatâs it. Letâs hope for some meaningful improvements and more steps forward than backward going forward!!!
18 Likes
Good post. Unfortunately ST are going to do what they want in their sweet, chronically slow time. The UI team appears to be so removed from the back end team. Priority seems to have been given to looks rather than function.
I still canât believe ST has not addressed how slow the app is in terms of updating states. How is that acceptable? Itâs not.
Very very frustrated.
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Yeah, agree with all of this. Good post. Also need to fix momentary buttons and child devices.
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Similarly, receiving no MOTION messages from a motion sensor is not the same as receiving a NO MOTION message. This is particularly annoying when writing automations that look for no motion after a certain time of night.
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Yup, the new app is awful.
And where are the smartapps?
I deleted an auto lock for my garage door and for the life of me I now canât find a way to get it do lock the #$%^& door.
UI?
The new app is a UI joke.
Smart Lighting, in my experience, has for the 4+ years Iâve owned SmartThings devices been the fastest response when automating something. I have tried the automations but have gone back to Smart Lighting almost every time. Itâs just more reliable, probably because it runs locally. I tried Webcore and although itâs more capable I still went back to Smart Lighting.
For example I setup a automation to turn on my kitchen under cabinet lights (a Philips Hue light strip and a Slvania light strip) when the main kitchen lights come on. Some days it would take 10+ seconds to happen, some days 3 or 4 seconds. Smart Lighting consistently was 2 seconds or less. With that said the automations have some options that I canât get to work in Smart Lighting so I do use them for some things like turn this light on at sunset and off 4 hours later. You can do that in Smart Lighting but youâd need two entries (a turn on a sunset and a turn off at sunset + 4) and since itâs for deck lights a delay doesnât matter. But for things like turn on a light when you detect motion Smart Lighting is almost instantaneous.
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As a general rule, if you have a custom DTH, youâll need to have a VID for it to render properly in the new app. Itâs because the device details page (device plugin) uses UI metadata instead of tiles to render capabilities, so you have to tell it what order to display them in. Full explanation and a guide on how to refactor a DTH so it shows properly in the new app here: https://smartthings.developer.samsung.com/docs/Capabilities/dth-migration.html
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The point was these were custom DTHs that had been working fine in the new app for several months without the need for a VID (and I am pretty fluent in DTH migration too). The default behaviour of the app was absolutely fine. In the last few weeks the default behaviour has changed from sensible to absolutely bonkers. The more rational behaviour was to decide the device was not accessible. The weirder behaviour was to display groups of tiles for attributes the DTH didnât even have about six times. That not just not rendering properly, thatâs a a badly broken app spewing its guts over the screen. However installing a VID restored sanity.
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