I know there's no grouping but

Do we know why not? I am a converted wink user and I think we could all agree that wink is an inferior product to smart things, but the wink had grouping abilities.

SmartThings can accomplish the same thing, it’s just done differently.

ST calls them “rooms”. Rooms are groups.

there is no why.

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Trend Setter!

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The honest answer is that there was grouping in the first version of the mobile app. Then they pushed out the second version of the mobile app to meet some calendar dates and when they did that grouping got left out. (There were no rooms either in the first iteration of the second version.) They’ve always intended to add grouping back in, but they’ve never gotten around to it, because they been working on higher priority issues.

Rooms aren’t the same thing because rooms let you group devices so that you can find them again in the UI, but not so you can execute them with a single command. Plus a device can only be in one room, which significantly limits that functionality.

There are still ways to group devices together so that you can turn them on/off as a group. There’s a how-to in the community created wiki that shows you a simple way, and a quick browse link to custom smartapps if you want something more sophisticated.

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Group_Lights_Together

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I tried to find the most appropriate thread to put this note in. And my choice was to necro this thread or start a thread that probably isn’t worthy of having it’s own thread.
anyway

You can still only have a device in one room - but ST changed something where now you can see ALL EXISTING DEVICES in the classic app when adding a device to a room. Even if the device belongs to another room already. If you put the device in a second room, the device will be removed from the first room.

I guess it doesn’t matter since the new app is coming, but this is super annoying. I would always use the “add device to a room” feature to quickly find a new device I added that may have accentually been added with a generic name. My issue is that I have too many devices to ever really use the “things” view to try to find a device that isn’t in a room (smaller list).

Anyway - just wanted to share this change I just noticed. I haven’t paid too much attention to the new app yet but I hope that if it has rooms - when you go to add a device to a room - please either only show the devices that are not in a room - or an even better idea that I’m pretty sure was proposed years ago - add a search to the things view.