I’ve been reading these forums with people having issues with SmartThings for various instabilities, reliability and issues with devices not behaving as programmed to do and I too have suffered some of these very issues over the last 18 months of being a ST customer.
Only recently have I managed to customise my settings and devices so that I can say with my own certainly that for the last 6 weeks, ST has been rock solid and I attribute that from my experience to simplicity, flexibility and compatibility.
I have over 50 devices in my house ranging from ST devices like their motion sensors, moisture sensors, multi sensors to HUE Lights and keyless dock locks.
I like most people I presume, set up ST to include all my rooms and devices and routines. With routines, I set up like others to have it change to various modes during the day like morning//evening/night etc at various times and those modes would determine whether lights would come on or off etc…
What seems to be a common issue for a long time now for others and affected me was that for one reason or another “Routines would fail to change” and therefore you could be stuck in morning mode when it was 7pm at night for example and the lights wouldn’t come on. This wouldn’t happen all the time of course but it would happen on average 1-2 times per week for me and so you can imagine the issues this causes with my family and security of the house when this HA tech is causing me embarrassment let alone frustration.
At one point ST support said (and advised in these forums) that to fix the routines not changing, you just had to amend your time settings for whenever they were due to change by a minute or so and that would freshen up your settings and get the routines changing again. This did work for a few days or a week but then you were back to the odd failing routine and I grew frustrated again!
The solution I have found is to not have your routines change by time of the day but by motion detect. Where as before I would set my morning routine to go into “Good Morning” mode at 6am and then switch to “Mid Morning” mode at 9am, now I say switch to Good Morning mode if motion is detected upstairs (when I get up) anytime between the hours of 6am and 8.59am. I applied these ‘flexi’ variables to each routine throughout the rest of the day and IT HAS NOT FAILED ONCE to change routine! Also I get the added bonus of it being flexible. So say for example at the weekend I don’t get up until 8.30-8.45am, then it won’t go into Good Morning mode until I get up and it detects motion - therefore until I get up, it will still be in Night mode or lockdown mode which is obviously better for security…
On the hardware side of things, I found compatibility to be the key. For example - I had a lot of Wemo switches integrated into my ST for months and they were forever failing and I have had issues with other non ST devices that can be linked to work in Labs mode etc.
I also upgraded to hub v2 from v1 during the last couple of months as well although I haven’t noticed any advantages/disadvantages of note in doing so.
Not too long ago, I noticed that ST updated the compatibility list of hardware devices and makers on their website so I took close attention to the list and made sure future devices I added were on this list - https://www.smartthings.com/uk/compatible-products
Anyway, I know that this won’t apply to everyone’s issues with ST and a lot of people have a lot more devices than I have but I just felt I needed to put this out there just in case any of you found some sort of solution or help in my experience. For the others, I hope the support team come back to you soon!