I wish I could join Smartthings

General Discussion
#1

I sure wish I could join the smartthings community… But after having a brand new V2 hub that wont connect to the app (the dreaded green light “hub not connected” problem), and ZERO response from support in 7 days/4 e-mails, this thing is getting boxed up and sent back today. Thats also 7 days of online chat not being available, even once.

Disappointing, because I was VERY excited to get it up and running, and work on some projects.

Cool idea, TERRIBLE support. At this point, I’d have to recommend one of the competitors.

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#2

It is probably wise not to get started with SmartThings right now. While there have always been minor problems, it really went downhill last Fall and they’re overwhelmed by the problems, plus they have not yet demonstrated to me that they are on the right track to getting things cleared up.

I would add that, in general, this is a lousy time to get started in HA. Hopefully we’ll see major players like Apple and Google weigh in later this year with a lot more, but for now, the things that are mainstream are not very good (unless you want to go with a computer based system or high dollar custom installs).

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#3

Good decision. SmartThing S Titanic

#4

Clearly, SmartThings priorities have shifted in recent months from the hub to other projects (possibly SmartTV or who knows what). The degradation of support and general perception of product abandonment cannot be explained away by the introduction of V2 and expansion into GB market alone. Something else must be going on.

#5

Doesn’t look like you’ve reached out to the community for help yet, perhaps if you describe your problem we might be able to help.

There are people having issues but there are plenty of people like myself that are working very well to the extent it’s no worse than any other system out there.

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#6

I really do think that’s enough of a cause and explanation for the problems… Doesn’t explain why they can’t fix them, though. I’ve offered to help; whether I could or not is debatable, but their “hiring like mad” process hasn’t paid off yet, so perhaps they are missing out by not hiring certain types of people.

#7

In my experience, it’s much worse. Particularly mobile app performance. SmartThings is the most sluggish, unresponsive app of all Smart Home apps that I’ve ever used. Updating SHM or any screen for that matter, takes 20 seconds on a good day. On a not so good day, it does not update at all. Often I stare at the spinning wheel for 30 - 40 seconds and just give up. Totally worthless for remote monitoring and control.

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#8

Which is fair and I’m not denying you of that but while your experience is vast and well respected, it’s by no means the only one.

When I first started with Wink the app wouldn’t even install on my bone stock Nexus 4 :smile:

The Wink app has improved since of course but for me even in the later stages it would hang a lot and the pairing process was one of the most awful experiences of life. Heck people think migrating/replacing hubs on ST is awful, try it on Wink…

Add new (SINGLE!) device… it may or may not go into pairing mode, if it does go into pairing mode your device may pair but the hub may or may not realise something had since paired and then error out saying it didn’t find anything, even though it did. If you do manage to successfully pair a (SINGLE!) device make sure you click NEXT --> NEXT --> NEXT through the same ‘tutorial’/tips every. single. damn. time. you add each device separately.

Anyway, don’t want to go too far off topic.

#9

I must be lucky. I got into the ST stuff about 3-4 months ago. Yes, there is the occasional glitch, or problem from the hub/service, but for the most part everything I have works pretty well and reliably (ST, Echo, LIFX, GE Switch, GE Link Bulbs). It definitely takes some patience and thought to make it all work the way you want. I just added a Fibaro motion sensor and I know it will take some work to get it right, but this is a hobby with the benefits of doing some cool stuff and making life easier around the house.

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#10

That’s certainly the right attitude. If you take SmartThings too serious, then you can get frustrated very quickly. Right now, SmartThings is definitely not suitable for anything that matters, but absolutely you can impress yourself and your friends with the things your house can do.

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#11

My lights come on and go off via voice and/or certain times. Going to bed it much easier now. All the lights turn off, and doors lock, etc! I agree I would not use it in an environment that needs to be 100% reliable and/or secure.

#12

I was very excited to get into SmartThings 2 years ago, but I can’t help but feel it is another stop gap solution in my long history with home automaton.

1.) It is not Smart! It does nothing with the data it collects from your usage; that seems to be for the sole benefit of SmartThings.

2.) It’s poorly automated. The word “Automation” brings with it a certain expectation of reliability, which IMHO is not there yet.

3.) It’s sluggish. Not just in responding to the instructions it has been given, but with regard to the company itself. For a small start-up, they seem surprisingly immobile. I look (from a user/consumer perspective) what’s been expanded upon over the last two years and am a little dumbfounded.

4.) I imagine most of us are already invested in one of the two leading mobile platforms. For me, since 2012, it has been Google/Android. Google knows when I’m not home. Oftentimes it knows where/when I will be leaving and how long I’ll be gone. And it knows when I am on my way back. It already uses this data (and much more) to provide me info proactively. Google even catalogs my photos and allows me to search for things in them “without me having to tag them”, and builds travelogs of my trips based on location data and photo content!

The thought of this kind of ‘smart’ behavior coming to devices in my home is very compelling. I don’t have to program it, just answer the occasional query as to whether I care about something I have previously expressed interest in.

While Samsung has the horsepower to accomplish something akin to this, I don’t believe they have the expertise. Apple, Google, and even Microsoft do. And Google has such an incredible head start, I’m betting on them.

And while there will be those that are uncomfortable with this kind of data mining, if your platform of choice is cloud based, it’s already being collected. Would you prefer for it to be used to your benefit, or solely for the platform owners?

So I am once again in a holding pattern, expecting, hoping, praying that 2016 is a year where we see solid indications that smart homes will actually become smart. I know Google can do it. Apple and Microsoft too. SmartThings/Samsung… not so much.

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#13

Mines pretty smart… It wakes me up every morning, tells my kids to get out of the shower, remind me to take my meds, turns on lights when I need then and off again when I don’t.

It can play music and tell me the weather. It can search Netflix and play a movie.

It adjusts the temp to keep us warm.

It tells me if I left the garage door open and it tells me when my kids are home or gone.

And it does all of this very reliably, with very few problems and errors.

For something made out of sticks and bricks…

I have to say that my house is pretty damn smart!

Shoot, this spring is going to learn to water my yard… I can’t even teach my teenagers to do that!

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#14

Time to teach your “house” to mow your lawn next. That’s my next on the shopping list (just waiting for the dust to settle after putting a dent in the budget with my smart vents) But spring is not here yet, so I have time to brush up :slight_smile:

#15

Inn trying so hard to get my wife to agree to those.

I’m thinking about just not telling her. I’ll get them one at a time and by the time she notices, I’ll already have them!

#16

[quote=“bamarayne, post:13, topic:35383, full:true”]
Mines pretty smart… [/quote]
I’ll agree that it is automated; but not smart.

Same time every day? What about holidays? Or days when you have an early meeting scheduled? Or none at all? Or a day you will leave early with the entire family for a vacation.

Can it play music you didn’t know about, but that you’d probably like? or from an artist you expressed interest in elsewhere. Will it tell you the weather in San Francisco if you live in Sac, but have a meeting there today at 2PM?

If everyone leaves, I suppose it will scale back the heat. Does it know if you just went to the local grocery store and that you’d only be gone for half an hour… or if you went to the local golf course you’d be gone for 5. What if you’re away for an extended period of time? does it know to lower set points only to keep pipes from freezing? If your home is 55°, and you’ll be back in 45 minutes, will it be warm by the time you get there?

Yes we can program our automations to do things we foresee. But foreseeing every event and coding/rule creation for it is impossible, because it is not “smart”. It doesn’t learn anything, and doesn’t associate events in your life that are input from elsewhere, and there is no simple way to input them from within the current platform.

Seems to me that the whole cloud platform would be predicated on this. If we just wanted local device A to turn on when local motion sensor B receives an event, we wouldn’t need the cloud, right? Our phones and computers know our schedule, location and location history, browsing history, communication history, purchase history, and more. Access to this data, and using it for input to rule based actions are what will make our homes’ truly smart.

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#17

I kind of feel like this is an unreasonable expectation.
Your house will never just upgrade itself to support completely smart coordination with your life without first adding some sort of hardware. (obviously)
And tracking your location and making predictions of where you will go next is hardly what I would consider intelligence as it relates to Home Automation…
Sure, it can start to begin interpreting your schedule as best as it can, but those are novel things that make you smile… but using it in accordance with mobile kids, and spouse all coordinated together to improve the efficacy of your “smart home”'s performance seems highly unreasonable.

Just my two cents.

If you bought the product expecting it to you do everything for you and magically make your house start flashing lights and locking doors it’s just not that easy and probably won’t be.
The alternative would definitely be to hire a professional to do all of it for you… but that only goes so far.

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#18

Yes, it is automated, but for an inanimate object being automated is smart.

Yes, unless I tell Alexa that I’m sleeping in, then it wakes me an hour later. Different schedule on the weekend, based on what I tell the house the night before.

Actually yes, I just ask Alexa to play me some music and based on my browsing history it picks new things. And yes again about the weather. Just this morning I asked the weather outside, got it. Then I asked for the weather at my destination over a hundred miles away… Got that too.

It doesn’t need to know if I’ve just run to the store our if I’m gone two days, if no one else is home it wakes back the a/c to what I want. I have pets, so it’s never to hour or too cold. But if the house was empty, it could definitely scale back the temp even more after a set amount of time.

But programming our automatons are what makes it smart. Smart home is a relative term. It doesn’t mean smart like a person. The home is not intuitive, yet. I’m not rich and I can’t afford Jarvis.
But it does know when I’m going up the stairs and it’s dark. It will light the stairs, and then the hallway.
It knows if my wife left the house and she left ask if the lights on again, or her curling iron… The house will turn them off.

I believe you’re confusing the term smart home with the term artificial intelligence. Yes, siri can tell you what kind of restaurants are nearby in a new city that you like to eat…n. But could it do it on day one? No. You had to tell it your favorite and you had to let it track your movements.

Clever programming is not AI. It’s just clever programming called smart, just like my house.

My house can’t predict that I will be gone longer than an hour, but I can tell it that I am gone. It isn’t smart… What my house is, is a thing that makes my life easier and better.

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#19

Exactly, Apple and Google beginning to track your every move and your habits is hardly what I would consider to be proof that they have some sort of 1UP in the Home Automation space.

Apple’s idea of HA is HomeKit?.. really? Just another way to sell proprietary devices licensed to work only with HomeKit making our lives even more dependent on one company.

I like the idea of z-wave and smartthings due to it’s ability to roll with the future.

#20

Exactly right. SmartThings cloud is largely superficial. It serves no useful purpose other than amassing tons of user data (for the benefit of SmartThings, not the user). I cannot think of anything that SmartThing cloud does that cannot be done locally. TTS was probably one of them, but even that’s been broken for who knows how long.

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