Having paid full retail for the starter kit and a couple of overly priced plug sockets to say I feel miss-sold on the product would be an understatement, I initially emailed customer services and had two replies from Tom Lane who has since failed to reply to my last message asking for an update on Oauth and why Smartthings listed Lifx lighting as being compatible prior to my purchase only for it to me removed in the App without notice.
Having now found these forums my impressions are this, the product was not ready for launch backed up by Samsung still giving out kits for testing and developement foc whilst I paid Ā£300, the customer service/forum moderator being of little use other than attempting jokes and posting gifs.
If Apple had bought Smartthings it would of worked.
Apple would never have bought SmartThings, the base architecture does not fit their customer service philosophy. The need for device types alone is antithetical to their walled garden approach.
If you want to see what an apple home automation system will look like, wait until the summer of 2016 and then look at HomeKit. There arenāt enough devices released yet to really make it worth considering unless youāre only interested in lighting.
Thanks for the reply, not being up on the technical aspects of how these things work my comment regarding Apple was more a light hearted dig, but in reference to my past experience with Apple, things tend to work.
More importantly I purchased this product off of a marketing campaign backed by one of the biggest consumer electronic companies in the world and believe I have a right to expect a product ready for general sale, compatible with something like Lifx as declared on the Smartthings website and preferably without my Sonos system being activated regularly by the presence/proximity fob sensor that hasnāt even moved, unless it got up and took itself for a walk and then approached my home activating the system.
As for the customer service, the clue is in the title.
Hi all, same thing here. Testing with the insiders campaign and not happy to see it at minimum functionality. If I had paid full retail price for it, I most certainly would have returned it, and not quietly either! HOWEVERā¦ Anyone just received that email about 30mins ago saying the uk servers will be updated on Thursday at 2am and be offline for approx 2hrs?.. Maybe this is the fix we are waiting for!!! I certainly hope so as once sorted I think STs would really take off.
I did see that email but am not getting my hopes up just yetā¦ @Aaron - could you add any detail as to what this downtime is for? Given it has a direct impact on what we can do during those 2 hours are we at least able to see a changelog as iād hope the changes scheduled for that window have already been locked down?
Look forward to hearing back on this and my earlier point re an official response on the situation. I think the last few posts are pretty damning on top of those already posted.
I hope you can get an official response as it would no doubt take a load off your plate (which im sure would be welcomed!)
Not often I get excited about a server-side software updateā¦ Maybe this is the update weāre all waiting for, or maybe theyāre going to get @aaronās gif collection to come out of any device with a screen within reach of our smart things hubs.
If the fix was only to Smartthings servers they would have fixed it long ago. What is happening is that they probably need fixes on other companies servers as well (IFTT?) and thats beyond their control, that is the reason why it takes so long and why they cant give a firm date when it will be fixed.
IĀ“m on a same boat with you guys, my IFTT doesnt work, but IĀ“m not gettin overly mad over it, I understand how working with 3rd parties that are beyond your control is both highly aggravating and time consuming (also the 3rd party rarely cares much about your customers concerns).
IĀ“m sure they will get this working as soon as its possible, in the meanwhile IĀ“m integrating non-IFTT stuff like dimmers, door sensors and smart lighting (Hue just launched their v2, waiting for it to be available in Europe, technically you can run this locally I think).
Well said sir, yes i would love to see the IFTTT fix but my vote is for increasing @Aaron epic Gif collection ;). Working with 3rd partys on this kind of stuff is a nightmare to be honest, they will fix it only for IFTTT to update something else and then it will all start again, Smartthings is doing exactly what i wanted it for and doing an amazing job at it, i could not find another product that would do what i needed, the IFTTT integration will just be the cherry on the top. Yes i would like to see the UK leading in this kind of thing and having more products available such as light switches etc but until then we have two options, Wait, or develop them yourself, im not going to be able to do the latter so i will wait
The impression I had from the forum with comments from active developers who use the oAuth within their apps is that theyāre actually waiting on Smartthings. While its true Smartthings could of decided to ābetaā test their fix with IFTT and IFTT are taking their time to test and give feedback 'd hope if this was the case Aaron would be giving us a little more hope like āIts almost done, the fix is in testingā etc.
Similar to the above iām not that bothered by oAuth being missing at the moment. Its been missing since launch and Iāve spent time to either program around different apps and give myself a half working but stable solution or managed to just live without it. Iāll be honest what does bother me is the official response from Smartthings - while Aarons gifs bring a moment of joy Iām quickly reminded that we didnāt actually get a real response.
But OAuth works with Philips Hue. IFTTT works with Phillips Hue, so other companies have it working. Nest works with IFTTT, so another company has it all working all using OAuth. Netatmo works with it, all these are UK devices. It just seems like Smartthings are dragging their heels. Support respond that they have āthe best and brightestā working on it, but they seem unable to fix this quickly, 5 plus weeks of an outage is an issue I definitely feels like an issue has been discovered but the product was released anyway.
Iām not happy. I wanted a system that as the blub says, āPlays Well with Othersā. Smartthings in the UK simply does not do that right now.
Least you could do at this stage and until resolved is have an official page we can reference for updates on the matter and some kind of notice at point of sale (PCWorld it seems) pointing out the current limitations. You could have easily informed me at registration time ideally in the app itself or an email since you have my email address. We should not be left wondering why things are not working when you know there is a problem lasting several weeks.
I discovered this from the SmartTools author when I couldnāt auth the app. Iād not even got as far as failing to integrate IFTTT. After having to mess about to get Nest integrated by trying to create a SmartApp having logged into the US server only to find out I need to login on a different URL. Donāt let us login to the wrong server or redirect us appropriately please.
Howās this for an idea - very simple (to me, but Iām not a coder)
all apis make connection to the one url, and theyāre load balanced at this pointā¦
If the IP is in the EU, push to Server B
If the IP is in the US, push to Server A
If the developer queries the API, the SmartThings api server checks the US server, and if it doesnāt find any devices, it checks the UK server and makes a permanent record that the hub is an EU product, returning all the devices to the developer in a seamless manner.
Itsā not fair that small app developers are going to be the ones hurt by the move in the goalposts on a supposedly production-ready system, and SmartThings should be doing as much as they can to make changes to code unnecesscary.
If it was simple, they wouldāve fixed it already.
I used to work for IBM, and one of our projects was for the Olympics. We had a ton of resources, a lot of very smart people, decades of international experience, and dealing with access from multiple regions still took months to get right. (We did have it right before launch, however.)
I donāt know what the exact problems are, and I donāt know how many resources have been assigned to it, but I do feel sure itās going to take more than just checking the IP address on the query.
Sometimes, the reason that things are complicated is because people make it too complicated.
Some of the government IT failings lately are a classic exampleā¦ A database that costs a quarter of a million to get written and rolled out and runs over-budget, and I look at it and think I could do a better job with MSAccess, upscaled to a SQL server and some good encryptionā¦
Too many IT companies move away from the KISS model.
I agree - but Iāve worked in IT departments with 25 geeks in them back in my IT days, and itās taken little old first line support engineer me to state the obvious (especially with our AS/400 guys) and save the company a week of man-hours and re-programmingā¦ You never know how deep in to ātheir wayā with tunnel vision an implementer sometimes is.
I certainly hope so as once sorted I think STs would really take off.
