Is Smartthing Dead?

General Discussion
#1

Hi, not been here for a short while but it looks like everyone as jumped ship to other platforms such as Homey , Home Assistant or Hubitat. Cant blame them. Is there anyone left on here ?

So does anyone know what on earth is going on with ST. It it being developed ? Is there a roadmap ? What are Aeotec going to do with it.

I’ve had nothing but outage after outage with ST , with the last straw being the recent App update that wiped out all of my scenes and some automations and now the app is unstable, crashes my phone and hangs most of the time.

I’ve tried moving to Hubitat but that was awful to use … recently tried Home Assistant and that is very good… requires a lot more coding skills and the community , whilst helpful it does seem there are not many taking an interest any more as I see a lot of posts unanswered.

So I guess the question is where next ? I recently had very good support from Aeotec so I was hoping they were going to change the face of ST and bring out a new Hub with enhanced features etc but it looks like they have just stuck their name on the old v3 stuff.

I don’t think the newly advertised Simply is the answer for a migration from ST and I’ve read so many bad things about Homey I don’t think I want to risk that either .

It would be interesting to see if anyone from ST or Aeotec read these posts and are brave enough to answer …

Lets See ?

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#2

This forum was set up many years ago as a way for customers to help other customers, it’s not officially monitored so I wouldn’t expect any staff response here. If you want that, try their Facebook or Twitter channels, which at least are monitored by marketing people.

I think it will be interesting to see what Aeotec does with it. :thinking: Since they bought popp last year they own newer Z wave technology which they got in that acquisition, but smartthings is their first Zigbee effort, so I don’t think they’re going to want to make too many changes initially. We’ll see.

If you’re looking for official statements, see the announcements thread, that’s the one place where staff do post. Although often it’s just an announcement post and they don’t answer follow up questions.

An Update Regarding our Hardware

#3

Thank you for your reply

I think you may have just under written my thoughts here as there are no regular announcements, nobody knows what is happening with ST and support is non existent.

Its not marketing that needs to be listening its senior management who need to act and resolve the issues .

When I see topics on the community that are asking users to vote if they are willing to pay a subscription for a more reliable service I feel that is a strong message of failure to the senior management at ST .

It will only take a competitor to release a reliable fully featured alternative and ST would see their install base drop to near zero very quickly … I think they have been warned by many so its probably just a matter of time before this happens now.

I hope they sit up and act before that happens thou

#4

The point is that they could lose every single customer who has a hub and it would be less than 5% of the total number of people who are using the smartthings platform. Because most of the ones using the app are those who have a Samsung smart television or smart appliance. And based on public ratings, they are mostly quite happy.

Not only that, the happy customers are likely much more profitable customers than the ones who have hubs.

So again, just from a business point of view, what the people in this forum think, the hub-based power users, is unlikely to shape Samsung policy.

As far as competitors, they exist now. Echo has become quite a strong platform for Home automation, as has apple’s HomeKit, for people who only need simple rules. Control4 and Homeseer are potential candidates for people willing to spend the money they require. there isn’t anything identical to smartthings at its price point, but that’s likely because it loses money at its price point. Samsung got what they wanted out of their original purchase, but again there’s no real business reason to continue down that path.

I think the Aeotec partnership is potentially a very good one for the current power users, and I hope it works out.

(And again, I don’t have any inside information, I’m just another customer. So this is just my guesses based on having followed the industry for quite a while.)

#5

First, let me clear up a misconception. Half of Marketing is “telling and selling”, but the other half is " listening and learning ". So, yes, I absolutely want Marketing to provide market problems and evidence to senior management. As @JDRoberts points out, though, the reality is that this is not an attractive business compared to phones, appliances, and TVs.

Speaking only for me, I wasn’t able to find a perfect fit. So, most of my devices are on Hubitat. Most of my rules are on webCoRE. My dashboards are on SharpTools. And my total spend on home automation is laughable to Samsung (probably less than our LG washer/dryer - sorry, Samsung). Point being that it remains a relatively small and fractured market.

2 Likes
#6

Well, I predicted back in july/August that this forum would be dead and buried within a year.

I’d still be extremely confident betting money on that.

#7

Lots of people, and indeed in some aspects it is thriving like never before. I’ve never seen such a range of developers from novice to expert, hobbyist to commercial, covering C2C, direct connected and hub connected device integrations and a number of new style apps and automations. The only downside is I barely understand what they are doing.

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#8

you will lose that bet so you might as well go ahead and pay us now. to make it easy, make a huge donation to the charity of your choice and we’ll call your bet debt settled :wink:

7 Likes
#9

Best get a bit more specific about the terms of that bet then =p

For example, the fact that I’m apparently a ‘top 25% poster’ (and 99% of my posts are actually just telling people not to bother with smartthings anymore because it’s w*nk) … Well. Doesn’t exactly indicate a bustling, thriving little community, eh?

=p

#10

at least we have your posts to get our laughs for the day. :wink:

2 Likes
#11

A good rule of thumb for a typical forum:

90% of users never join the community
90% of posts are from the noisiest 1% of users

I was “Top 10% Poster” just before migrating most of my devices. My lifetime value to SmartThings had already been milked from me when I purchased my V3 hub. So, I was at my most noisy when I represented my least value to the company. It is what it is. I am not the target customer.

3 Likes
#12

Makes sense.

I guess the most appropriate answer to the question is probably:

"yes, the hobbyist version of smartthings (i.e. the reason many people initially used and loved it) is dead. Support has gone. Reliability is shot.

But the new version of ST will probably continue to grow into something different. But don’t ever expect it to ever live up to the reliability and functionality of the old school stuff you remember, because the company has changed direction and kept it just silmilar enough to keep the die-hards holding onto a sliver of false hope. Purely because officially pulling the plug entirely would properly and clearly put the nail in the coffin. Instead, it’ll slowly die on its own. "

RiP Old smartthings. Welcome new smartthings, the ecosystem which will do nothing other than let George and Sharon occasionally check in on the temp / contents of their expensive new fridge. And because so utterly little will be expected from it, the potential of people complaining about it will be minimal. And the sexy “Smartthings” badge will look great on the appliances, and require virtually no software support. Win!

#13

This may be foolish judging by past history, but I do expect reliability to improve once the switch over to the new platform is complete. At least, reliability for the official features operating on 15 devices or fewer with no custom code. We’ll see. :sunglasses:

3 Likes
#14

RiP Old smartthings. Welcome new smartthings…

Yes, that is probably true, and quite possibly suits the majority of users. Yes, there was a good community here, but that was needed as unless you used the very few ST devices then available, nothing else worked! Now the smart home concept has developed somewhat more, I would think the majority of devices that most people will want to implement will pretty much work out of the box. You might call that progress;) It is also much easier to set up automations, at least to a level that I think the majority of their customers might want. So, I think it has moved from an enthusiast’s hobby, pretty much to a plug and play solution- which kind of explains the little activity on here these days.
For those who want more sophistication or more hobby fun- time, I guess they move on. Not everyone(not many, I suspect) needs a mega dashboard with dozens or hundreds of sensors, switches, lights and all sorts of data that I for one, can see very little practical use for!

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#15

Meanwhile, Alexa is getting smarter and smarter!

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She’s actually looking at trends and suggesting rules to be added. :thinking:

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#16

I don’t get Smartthings/Samsung, I was mostly happy with the Old IOS App, then they forced us to upgrade and everything is super slow and buggy (not worth the trouble vs walking to the switch).
Also I have lost or gave up on most of my scenes and without my nighty Zwave repair scene I constantly have offline devices. I have approximately $3,000.00 in devices and hundreds of hours installing, programing, and finding code to get it all to work, then some CEO forces me to a new app and my smart house is gone. If sound mad you should hear my wife, we will Never buy another Samsung product the rest of our lives.

#17

in the last weeks it seems very slow, i dont know if it is because of aeotec servers but somtimes it takes minutes to control a device, i am getting really tired of it but having over 50+ devices and all the days i spent with my automations is hard for me to get rid of it.

#18

Aeotec is not providing any servers. Samsung will still provide the app and the cloud. Aeotec is only taking over support of the physical devices that have their logo.

An Update Regarding our Hardware

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#19

Just curious what you didn’t like about Hubitat.

1 Like
#20

I like to know to. I dont have hubitat but from everything I read, hubitat is talked about as being the old smartthings.

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