Hub Firmware Release Notes - 18.18

I have to agree with pjam73 that kind of situation is unacceptable. I’m not expecting much out of ST devs but definitely I’m expecting working device!!! I understand Alfa beta rc do what you have to do, but you got to take full responsibility for software you providing to your customers that they have no choice to accept it. What would happen to Tesla if they push update you have to accept and after witch you couldn’t reverse your car, Small glitch right? Here are people with often 150+ devices and even small bug have huge impact on them. I dont need any new features but at least 99.5% stability. I recommended ST to my family and now I don’t even know what to say to them, siren goin off, not arming or disarming properly, and have 20+ xiaomi devices that I can’t use and the only reason we invest in xiaomi because they been proven working with 17.17 I’m really disappointed and sadly I lost confidence with future update. What we going to do with our devices if they stop working after another update and they answer from ST devs will be they are unsported by this platform, we are aware they not officially supported that’s why we write device handlers smart apps and spend thousands of hours writing codes to make ST even better. Sad to see ST devs turning back on us. Now I see why some of the people here won’t recommend ST as a security system.

I don’t know of any SmartThings developers “turning back” on anyone. They have no reason to be anything but very concerned when there are issues. Some things are harder to fix than others. If all Customers experiencing this are diligently reporting this to Support@SmartThings.com, I’m very confident that they will escalate a rollback or whatever solution they decide is most appropriate.

Personally, I don’t think anyone should recommend SmartThings as a “security system”. There are much more mature players in the home security market, most of which have monthly fees that are more than the price of a single SmartThings Hub.

SmartThings does add some non-trivial incremental amount of security to households on a budget. There are quite a few reports of SmartThings saving homes from substantial water leak damages.


Should SmartThings be more stable / reliable? Sure … but:

  1. Stability, reliability, quality, etc., is somewhat correlated to price. I don’t expect a Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf to perform like a Tesla.

  2. On a “grand scale” SmartThings outages frequency and duration is low enough that they are still retaining and acquiring customers. I’m not implying that Samsung / SmartThings is deliberately satisfied with their statistics, but, purely from a business “bottom-line” perspective, there are most certainly “number crunchers” in the picture who decide the cost-benefit ROI for the product and platform. If the cost of improving stability by X% is $Y, and the incremental sales due purely to this improvement is < $Y; then there is no business justification for that investment.

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So I understand from your post that if something is not premium priced it doesn’t have to be reliable. Good to know. Did you hear that even tesla for 100k had major issues with f/w. I don’t know about you but when I buy something I’m expecting it will be working same why as at the day I bought it. I’m just sick to see that good devices turning in to unstable brick because of some bugs. 3 moths ago I bought Philips 65 inch tv of the year for 2,5k and same thing there was update giving this new " feature " sometimes not turning on, just reminding me that I watch to much of tv I guess. Premium price is not guarantee of superior device.

Absolutely agreed… but the converse is more likely to be true.

i.e., “Bargain priced products are likely to experience problems.”.


It’s both sad and just a little bit funny how often this exact same thread arises in the Community:

  • Sad, of course, because nobody likes an outage.

  • Funny, because consumers have such high expectations of this $80 miracle of technology … especially when those expectations are explicitly tempered here.

This Community Forum is 100% open to the public (and Google searchable). It only takes a few minutes of research to study this product’s reliability history before purchasing it, or within the return period.


I just gotta chuckle at how your first post uses Tesla as the example for how important it is for firmware not to cause issues, and then, in your very next post, use Tesla as the example of how firmware for a $100k product can have major issues… :rolling_eyes:

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[quote=“AdamBee, post:218, topic:93217”]
What would happen to Tesla if they push update you have to accept and after witch you couldn’t reverse your car
[/quote] I was more thinking what would happen to brand name, as I said before I’m not expecting much from ST only basic features that it been designed for. When I buying fridge it should chill my food, tv should turn on every time. And if for some reason you can deliver basic stuff then don’t sell it and go back to drawing board.

PS: thanks for your Action Tiles I really like them😉

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Had this about 3 times now.

I am pretty disappointed that no one from the Software Team has bothered to post a reply. All my zigbee devices have been offline since about 11am GMT. All I want is a little explanation or some reassurance that they are working on the issues. Thats nearly 12 hours since I posted the message above. I had sensors that worked previously that I will now probably never get paired back properly as the .18 f/w is now preventing that (granted they are unsupported but they did work before), would not have been happy but it would have been acceptable that new ones were out the window but the existing ones carried on to work as they were. Not to mention that even the ST Multi Sensor dropped at that time and is STILL offline. Very disappointed with the whole situation, no information from ST and my system was rock solid prior to this update.

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Sorry there hasn’t been much communication. The software team posts on the community on their own time, it’s not part of our “job description”. We want this fixed as much as you do, so we’ve been spending a lot of time trying to do that fixing.

These problems were unexpected (to put it mildly). Although the customer beta was short this time around, it was because this firmware had been in internal testing for almost 3 months. That includes all of the Hub team’s home systems, which are putting significant demand on the SmartThings system. We dogfood the heck out of this stuff in addition to more formal testing. When there weren’t significant issues in our setups, formal testing, or the customer beta the call was made to move ahead with the release.

The reason that a roll-back is more challenging than usual is because this update involved an update of the firmware that runs on the ZigBee radio itself. Again, those changes were thoroughly tested but still issues made it through. We’re worried that rolling back will cause new issues, in addition to possibly not fixing anything.

Part of our mitigation plan for firmware issues is not doing a full deploy at one time. Right now about 12% of the Hubs have 18.18. We immediately paused the release when issues started to come in so we could reevaluate. If you’re having issues, please double-check that you actually have received 18.18 so we can keep the signal-to-noise ratio high.

Please keep sending issues to support@smartthings.com and posting here. And keep us honest, although I don’t have much worry on that front :wink:

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I was told by support to send the beta@smartthings.com not support. Which is what made me think it was still beta support thinks it is lol

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Thanks for he reply Nick!

Can you not just pick a few users and roll theirs back? Seems that in house testing did not show up many issues so perhaps getting the community involved in fixing the issues that have arisen might help and get this moving much quicker. Will be a week tomorrorw since the update and all I have seen is things actually get progressively worse as opposed to anything being fixed (all my zigbee devices dropping off this morning for example).

After I lost all my zigbee devices, they did not come back online period and even though most are not supported the Multi Sensor is, why did they all just drop offline? This includes the Multi Sensor.

We/I appreciate that you guys post here in your own time but bearing this in mind where are the official comms channels to keep people updated please? All I received was an update e-mail and nothing since, nothing informing m that there may or that there are issues with the update. How are people who are not fortunate enough to be on this forum being informed of what may have been changed/broken? Cannot imagine the head scratching some people must be doing as they do not have this info.

Thanks again.

Mark.

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We’ve already had some community members helping us, and we’re very grateful. Sounds like you’d be willing to help as well and we’ll keep that in mind.

I unfortunately don’t have an answer for that specific question right now.[quote=“chippie, post:226, topic:93217”]
We/I appreciate that you guys post here in your own time but bearing this in mind where are the official comms channels to keep people updated please?
[/quote]

Email is our primary communication. Often though we choose to fix things in the background rather than making multiple communications though. It’s definitely a work in progress, and if you have suggestions for ways to make it better, they’re always welcome.

Anyone who was not part of the beta (which is now concluded) should use support@smartthings.com.

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@nastevens I’d be happy to help too, if it’s ever needed.

As a CX strategic advisor, might I suggest you to name/hire a community manager? We, enthusiasts, are most likely a minority of your customer base but I am pretty sure we directly or indirectly drive a lot of new business for you. I myself brought you 6 customers.

I’m driving my friends and family toward you because of trust, I believe in what you do. What you let us do with the platform is unbelievable (WebCoRE, etc) and I’m grateful for this.

Being open and honest with your communication will bring you more customers, even more than the expenses to make it happen.

Thanks for your posts and all!

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You do realize that SmartThings has had roughly 5 folks assigned to such a role over the years, right? I think the Community generally really appreciated them, but… it must have been a “less than rewarding” position.

(I actually applied for the role myself a few years ago. Didn’t quite have what they were looking for, so now I manage the ActionTiles Community Forum instead…).

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@tgauchat

No I’m afraid I don’t… I’m new around here. I’ve been very active since I joined but it’s been like 2-3 months. My eyes are fresh (is that even an expression in English? Sorry, not native) so I can’t have a definitive judgment on anything but I’ve been able to appreciate how wonderful is this community and how devoted we are.

In my mind, this devotion is what makes smartthings special and why I haven’t considered other solutions when it came to buy a hub.

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Provide an example, this seems like an outrageous claim - frankly.

No ‘but’ required. Enough said. Let’s hold them to it. Or should we accept less?

YUP. And the problem for consumers and ST alike is there is NOT A F**KING TELSA available yet in this space. WHEN someone steps up and offers one, ST will be deep sixed as folks that want that Telsa and can afford that Telsa will get that Telsa. This is market disruption and will happen.

ST is only staying afloat because that Tesla is not available, yet. Is that a good business model? Rhetorical, not saying you are claiming it is, just pointing out how fragile this is and how laziness can dismount and will dismount.

Control4, perhaps? They are among the highest rated, but, just like a Tesla, they are not the same class as anyone else.

SmartThings has been on the market for 4 years. Plenty of time for a competitor to take advantage of / exploit SmartThings challenges… ie, the level of unreliability you imply is unacceptable and that would have consumers running to them.

Until that happens, we have no evidence that SmartThings won’t be in a position to invest whatever is necessary to squash that competition (whether it be through aggressive marketing or by meeting the competitive quality metrics point for point).

So… The theory on the table is that what we all will benefit from is competition. Can’t argue with that!

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Fair enough, I equate Control 4 to the Mclaren/Ferrari/Lambroghini type markets rather than the Tesla market which is relatively more affordable.

Yes ST has been around for some time, but ST was (and is) a listless kickstarter style startup. I would pay hundreds, perhaps thousand for a hub, or even (gasp) a monthly fee for a reliable system - for example. These mid markets (Tesla) will develop, I believe. I don’t necessarily buy into the idea there has been ‘enough time’ even ST seems listless 4 years later, despite being under Samsung. The lameness of @alex as an example of that listlessness - just seems to be twisting in the wind trying to figure out who they are and how to deliver… etc…

For now, I will just hope and pray that ST/Samsung won’t invest simply to crush competition. They can’t seem to find their a** for the last couple of years so it doesn’t really keep me up at night. :wink:

My system ok since update apart from battery reporting (ST multi-sensor is bouncing between 1% and 17%, and I’m getting reminders to replace the battery). I’ll keep using it until it fails before changing the battery. My ST and TKB outlets behaving ok (apart from the most distant ST one initially being slow to respond, though I presume the mesh has rebuilt since the new firmware, as is now behaving fine).

Dave

I know I was being somewhat hyperbolic in questioning whether there were other systems that suddenly stop working :slight_smile:

But most of them aren’t as important as Smartthings - who cares if a Chrome update breaks things? It’s free, and you can just use another browser. On the other hand, my $400 PVR silently updated last night to provide a UI refresh, but guess what? They tested it enough that nothing broke.

Before this update my Multi Sensor Battery was over 80% and now I am seeing the same with the addition that it is actually going offline. I have deleted and re-added it now to see if it holds but since ALL my zigbee devices dropped around this time yesterday I am not holding my breath.

I appreciate that an update like this can drain batteries and that the way the batteries are reported has changed so where was the email informing us of this and to go out and get spare batteries!

I really have lost a little faith unfortunately, lost previously working sensors (unsupported admittedly but they DID work great before), lost ST’s own Multi Sensor off the System twice now for no apparent reason. Lost ~$250 due to investing in sensors that did work fine before, not ST’s fault of course as they are not officially supported but I had faith as they did work prior to this update. I do understand that things need to get updated but there really should be a option to opt out of the update should it be known that things like this may happen and if they were not known then clearly not enough testing was carried out or not enough people with different configurations were involved. Even if opting out leaves you without official support for the product. I would rather have that and everything running rock solid as it was previously then have the latest /w with half of my sensors turned into mini paperweights. Without going into detail I was reliant on the Xiaomi sensors on my windows not really as a security measure but more for peace of mind, hence investing in more. They no longer stay online but it is what it is I guess.

Fingers crossed that they manage to at the very lease sort all the other issues out even if they do not look at the issue with the unsupported sensors which used to work.

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I feel very lucky as I got updated to 18.18 and have not been affected at all everything is still working as it should , Even my little Xiaomi contact & motion sensors :slight_smile:
I did notice some difference in battery percentage fluctuating but that seems to have settled now.