Yeah, well… were I new to this, I certainly would not make any investment in a system whose owner/marketer has declared obsolete.
Guess that makes me a purveyor of the sunk-cost fallacy at this time lol
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As one of the IRIS refugees, I see two points from my perspective. First, the open source Arcus coming from IRIS may or may not be dead yet, I don’t know.
Second, and I haven’t checked since about 5 or 6 days ago, but the last I checked I did see an option of professional monitoring from ADT through ST for 6 month discounted rates of $5 off (Standard or full monitoring) Why would they make such an offer if the service was disappearing?
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That’s been there since they introduced the service. So as long as they are still officially offering it, stuff like that is going to show up.
The smartthings terms of service say they can change anything at any time even if it causes your existing system not to work:
https://www.smartthings.com/terms
Will SmartThings ever change the Services?
.
We’re always trying to improve the Services, so they may change over time. We may suspend or discontinue any part of the Services, or we may introduce new features or impose limits on certain features or restrict access to parts or all of the Services. In some cases, the changes we make to the Services may cause older hardware devices, third party services, software configurations or setups to no longer work with the Services, and you may be required to upgrade or change these devices, services, configurations or setups in order to continue using the Services. We’ll try to give you notice when we make a material change to the Services that would adversely affect you, but this isn’t always practical. Similarly, we reserve the right to remove any Content (including any SmartApps or device or external service connections provided by SmartThings or by third parties) from the Services at any time, for any reason
I’m not saying they will, I’m just saying they can, and you’re supposed to know that. 
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Yes, I remember reading that, but I’ve worked with my states AG’s office, for money paid and services not offered before, with success. I suspect that if I paid for service through a contract and the service was not followed through that I would easily get my money back at least. It seems that most businesses, even with such wording in contracts, don’t like dealing with AG offices, at least in my experiences. I can’t imagine many customers not taking action if businesses act in bad manners.
Yes, a contract makes things different, but even the ADT paid monitoring service is only a month-to-month contract, so they would only be obligated for the standard billing period.
As far as Samsung and state attorneys general, remember washing machines that exploded and mobile phones that caught fire… they have some experience. 
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Month to month unless the customer went with the 6 month plan, correct? Then they would be obligated for the 6 months.
Maybe, just depends on the terms of the contract. There’s an “out“ clause in a lot of commercial contracts. Refunding the money for the service not provided, yes, but not typically an obligation to provide the service.
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That’s why we bought an LG washing machine recently instead of a Samsung. The Samsung dishwasher we bought even more recently came with a missing basket wheel that took a few months to get resolved. I guess I’m a gluten for punishment with Samsung. Now this! I don’t even know if my old Samsung S2 tablet still works since I haven’t tried to use it in a couple of years.
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The good news is that I have until March 10th to use Amazon’s 30 days return policy if it comes to that.
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ST & ADT really F’d this up.
It sure seemed like an easy opportunity - with the right marketing, possibly installation assistance, maybe optional contract monitoring at lower prices, etc…
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What doesn’t Samsung F up??
I don’t know - maybe, just maybe, they actually have good intentions. But if you look at their track record, all you see is “let’s make as much money as we can by selling stuff, and then move on to the next sale”.
Like sfink above, Samsung’s track record drove me to not even look at their products anymore. Bad for them, because I just purchased an entire kitchen’s worth of LG appliances.
I’m gonna make ‘em somewhat smart via energy monitoring. Aside from the oven, all are 120v.
Turns out the GE Zigbee smartplug is rated at 1800 watts, which is 15a at 120v. So I’ll be using those to monitor the dishwasher and microwave, and perhaps the fridge. Might even modify a DTH to eliminate the programmatic on/off, and to (hopefully) report power usage less frequently. So they will be able to let me know, via Alexa, when a wash or cook cycle is complete, or if the fridge is drawing more power than usual.
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Ouch. . . I am also an Iris refugee with a shiny new ADT/SmartThings hub and just yesterday moved most of my devices over from Iris. I set up the ADT branded sensors but didn’t physically install them.
It’s not too late for me to pack it up and send it back to Amazon but then what? I liked the option of professional monitoring with ADT/ST hub but it was an option that I might never use. I always self-monitored with Iris and that was fine. What would you do?
My options are leaning towards solid choices, ones that have the best chance of staying in the crowded market. I’m thinking Amazon’s Ring Alarm product and Simplisafe may be the best options for me at this point.
I already have the unencrypted version of Simplisafe ready to go if I had to. I was amazed to learn about that major flaw, see HACKED. The encryption issues forced people to upgrade to the :fixed" version has made me hesitant to go back to Simplisafe but am reconsidering that choice again.
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I still stand by what i said earlier. The point i was making is that it isn’t going to magically stop working if they decide to discontinue the product. Zwave S2 could be nice, but not needed in the current state because the dual branded sensors support security. I also doubt that it would make any sense for ADT to kill support for monitoring as it uses their ADT Canopy system for setup and notifications. That isn’t something special to the ADT Smartthings panel. They would have to go out of there way to not allow it to work.
With that said i certainly wouldn’t invest in it once this concern is made official. Until then it is just speculation. I have said to people for a long time to always buy for what somwthing can do today, and not for the promises they make on the future. This is simply because promises are two easily broken.
I actually think this could be a good opportunity for Samsung to move it forward and make a better security setup. Imagine they take the current hardware, upgrade it with software support for Zwave S2, simply replace the UI with something more samsung specific and use Smart Home Monitor locally on it by default. The new keypads could add extra location control from the base station. They wouldn’t even need new hardware just a upgrade to what they have. If it is all smartthings they could eliminate the silo issues and integration would work better.
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All of this is, of course, still speculation. Neither smartthings nor ADT has officially announced anything about an “end of life” date for the hub model. And the current ADT/Lifeshield option, while it has a DIY install, does, based on Rose’s research, still require a three-year contract.
Many industry analysts saying ADT is going to have to move that model line to the optional contract format to compete with ring and nest, but they aren’t there yet. Right now their only offering in that space is the partnership with SmartThings. So who knows how long they might take to make that kind of change and when or if they will decide to drop the SmartThings partnership.
Suppose, for a moment, that from ADT’s point of view The SmartThings offering’s biggest problem is not enough people have bought it. We know it’s missing cameras and secondary panels. And zwave S2 SmartStart. But it is cheap.
What if they’re going to wait until they see how many Iris refugees switch to the ADT SmartThings model? Because I could easily see that doubling the current number of accounts.
And I feel the ADT is not going to want to damage their public reputation by just pulling the plug on the whole thing, at least not without offering existing contract customers an easy way to shift to one of their other model lines.
ADT has tended to run experiments for several years, gathering market and customer support data.
So maybe their plan (not Samsung’s, ADT’s), is to pick up as many of the iris customers as they can (the ones that used iris mostly for monitored security), continue to experiment with a limited contract model, tweak that business as they learn more about it, and then in a year or so pull the plug but offer the SmartThings/ADT customers A shift to a new no contract lifeshield model that includes cameras and a much better panel.
I’m not saying any of this will happen, but I’ll bet it’s being discussed. Because I think ADT does protect its brand to the extent that it can. And I agree with the industry analysts Who feel that if you want to appeal to millennials you need to be able to compete with ring. And you need to have optional integrated cameras and much easier setup.
Again, ALL of this is just guessing. Well, other than the fact that ADT bought LifeShield.
So maybe I’m being foolish, but I personally feel more comfortable about the fact that the ADT name is involved. And the potential jump in subscribers from the new Iris refugees could be important.
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Would you invest in it at this time if you were a newbie coming over from Iris? Especially if your main goals were self-monitoring and automation?
I wouldnt if i was self monitoring
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If they were planning on testing the market with Iris users, they would at least have to make the sensors in stock and available. The fact that you can’t get them pretty much shows they aren’t trying to do that…
Knowing what I know I would. If i didn’t know anything about the hub I would probably have the Ring System. I am not as concerned about monitoring for Fire and Water with ADT and the cost is pretty awesome with Ring. If ring didn’t miss their original launch date i probably would have it. But as i understand it ring is also a walled garden to some extent.
As things stand today there is no better alarm option with Smartthings. Even with the Zwave S2 feature missing. I do believe that. The S2 feature though it would be very important to have on the Smartthings hub for security isn’t as much of an issue with the ADT Smartthings panel because of the dual branded sensors. I do believe it is a good alarm system for what it is. Technology changes and things improve over time, so we shouldn’t expect something to always be on the cutting edge. I would expect as time passes technology would either need to improve or be left behind.
I would expect though because of all of the integration work i am a bit bias. On most platforms as i understand it though the custom stuff i have done isn’t even option. I have actually start to look at updating the ADT Tools app to be installable using the new Smartthings API’s. That would give it a bit more integration life as well.
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I was just about to recommend the ADT/ST hub to a friend. That’s a no now I guess. As @tgauchat mentioned earlier, ST had quite a lot of potential to make this work but it seems like no one bothered. Searches for SmartThings rarely shows the hub, so imagine how few people were even aware it existed.
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