Important changes to Community Code Submissions and Developer Discussions

As we, SmartThings, grow we are continually evaluating our priorities as a company. Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been going through that process and seeing what is important for SmartThings to be successful in 2017. As part of this new year we are working on some amazing new features and product, some of which directly impact developers. I personally am very excited about these initiatives. If you have joined the past few developer calls these are the initiatives I keep saying we “can’t talk about”. Part of prioritization and new projects is making tough decisions regarding current processes that we have not done a good job of supporting or do not lend themselves to making our vision a reality.

In order to keep focus on these new and exciting initiatives, we are diverting focus from some of our processes that haven’t been getting much love lately, so we can more intensely focus on making a great developer platform for all of us! Starting today, 03/02/2017, we will temporarily be suspending the review of community submitted code (both future and pending submissions) and conducting monthly developer calls. Doing this allows us to focus on executing our vision for the future of development on SmartThings.

We thank you for your patience as we work hard in the background to bring you new and exciting features and tools!

On that note, please be sure to join us at the Samsung Developer Conference. We’ll be really excited to see you there!

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Uh, bummer…

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So no community submitted solutions will be reviewed…

And no more developer calls.

Wow… Just… Wow…

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Your plethora of developers in the smartthings community are the greatest strength of this platform. It enables compatibility and versatility of the platform way beyond the official scope. Abandoning submissions and dev interactions sounds pretty crazy to me. I can’t believe smartthings does not treasure this as a massive asset that none of your competitors have.

Without the fantastic community devs this platform is nothing in my view.

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Oh well, I can’t withdraw CoRE, it’s GPL, but it sure feels like one of those moments. Starting to understand @bravenel, though I never agreed with his move… not sure why ST would take such a hard turn…

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I guess everything new will just be posted to GitHub, and only ST DHTs will be official. Makes no sense, but there is nothing we can do.

Suspending the things that are crucial to giving ST its competitive advantage? It sounds like “executing” that vision is going to involve a virtual firing squad.

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I think there is something we can do: express our feelings, put some sense in ST’s decision makers?!

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I hear they’re using anti-aircraft guns in North Korea these days… sounds just the same, doesn’t it?!

Collect email addresses so we can follow your work on other platform :grinning:

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I have no data for this, but my guess is still this is all in preparation for a TV – based system. We’ll see.

But without that satisfying series of BOOMs that Best Korea’s solution offers.

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Tim for clarification would this be code submitted through the IDE or even patches for ST DTH and SmartApps on GitHub?

I’m presuming that SmartThings won’t “ignore” Pull Requests on the public GitHub code (and I hope most of it remains public); but unless it’s a genuine urgent bug, such pull requests will only be incorporated at the discretion of the assigned developer on his/her assigned schedule.

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What difference does it make? Adding CoRE to marketplace it just makes things more difficult. Think in terms of bugs and updates. No GitHub integration? Thanks, but no thanks.

I can understand suspending the review of submissions if new features and processes are soon to be launched. But suspending the developer calls, the last real line of open communication. That’s unreal!

I am starting to highly regret my choice to buy into this poorly run company. I’ve appealed to @slagle and Alex directly to improve the communication. It’s fallen on deaf ears and now ST has decided to shot off the developer community entirely. I can’t easily recoup my ST investment as such, I will be passing on any more Samsung branded products, including ST branded sensors.

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When was the last time you’ve Installed an app from the market place? If you did, I suggest you to do a quick serach, so you can get your free of bugs version of the marketplace app that hasn’t been updated in … a while

They just made me split CoRE into parent and child apps so that we can publish it… that complicates github deployment a great deal. For the users…

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! Feeling the love

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Actually slitting them is good for users. They can actually use the child app with secondary accounts. But I hear you … lots of preparation for nothing, when everything was working just fine…We still love your app man, and we are very grateful for all the work and pioneering you have done.

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