Is SmartThings still in business?

@Jason_Keirstead, I’m looking into several but might go old-school and check out HomeSeer. Its more technical than I want to be, but if I slow down and take some time I can build exactly what I need. I would be interested in hearing your experience with Wink, too (PM is fine so as to not hijack the thread). If ST gets this fixed in the next few days, they may be able to salvage what little trust I have left, but once I start moving things to an alternate platform and get it working, chances of staying/coming back are slimmer and slimmer.

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I haven’t had the problems you are talking about. My biggest problem is the IDE takes a very long time to load and sometimes it times out. They are aware of it and are working to resolve it. All my automations work, so I have no big complaints yet.

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Tim,

I have a lot of respect for you but those kind of posts do you a huge disservice. By stating that stability can be innvovative you are effectively agreeing with my point. Since we do not have feature innovation, and since many of us have no real stability, there is in fact no innovation taking place.

Many people have called you and other staffers out about Alex’s disappearance from the forum and the lack of promised weekly updates. How about you directly address that, right here, right now, once and for all, for everyone to see?? I challenge you and the rest of the ST team to give us all a reason why that stopped happened and why Alex is gone from the forum.

Better yet, how about Alex come here and directly address the community, right on this thread. Can you make that happen???

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I’d really be interested in knowing some real numbers rather than anecdotal numbers on the platform’s stabilty. Lots of people have reported stability issues, lots of people have reported no significant issues (at least in the last 6 months). No platform has 100% uptime and reliability. In fact, in my experience, even “commercial” SaaS platforms typically have at most 99.9% uptime in their SLAs. It sucks when you’re the one who is affected by the 0.1% of the time when the perform isn’t working, but from a purely business standpoint solving for that last 0.1% just doesn’t make sense. I have no idea if SmartThings is anywhere near 99.9% or not. I wonder if they’d be willing to share their internal numbers on that.

I would like to see the metrics too but the truth is I really do not care about platform metrics, I care about my system. It does not surprise me to find apologists like yourself here. I encountered this in the Iris community. The funny thing is that a year later those people are still apologizing for the actions of a company whom they have no ties with. I see the same trends here.

Since just about everything runs in the cloud, we have a common platform and therefore my system is not running in some unique configuration. It is therefore not unreasonable nor statistically inaccurate to draw a conclusion that the high number of failures I am seeing, while potentially concentrated to a specific platform feature (i.e. Routines) which I use a lot of, are more widespread. Statically I likely use a lot of routines therefore I can expect to experience more problems, but the fact is Routines still fail around 80% of executions.

Usually in software development repeated, clustered failure events are tracked and given a high level of scrutiny. In this case I and others have repeatedly signaled problems specifically with routines and device communication and almost 2 months later nothing is done and there has barely even been an acknowledgement. For all I know that Issue #233 on the fix list. It would be nice to know where the issue stands in the break-fix list because it will likely make or break my choice to stay with ST and also whether I ever buy another Samsung product again.

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So did ou have device communication problems with Iris AND SmartThings?

[quote=“Michael_Shutt, post:28, topic:74650, full:true”]I’d really be interested in knowing some real numbers rather than anecdotal numbers on the platform’s stabilty. … In fact, in my experience, even “commercial” SaaS platforms typically have at most 99.9% uptime in their SLAs. …I have no idea if SmartThings is anywhere near 99.9% or not. I wonder if they’d be willing to share their internal numbers on that.
[/quote]
Most SaaS contracts I’ve seen specify four-to-five nines. Which is much better than you’ve seen. And of course it depends on how you measure it; typically it’s measured for the total service - i.e. the integrated deliverable, while historically ST has counted periods where SHM didn’t work or devices weren’t responding as not so much down as slightly depressed. So it is a question of how “up” is needed to be up.
Of course, using their recent cheery language, they’d probably say, “We have three-nines reliability! Yeah, it’s 65.999%, but there are three nines there!”

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In simple, i think what EVERYONE who has invested money and time into your platform is saying to you (and i know your all reading this, not just @slagle, or atleast id hope so) is fairly obvious and you would be foolish not to respond asap as its becoming the most common post on this community, just reworded in a 101 ways…

START COMMUNICATING MORE WITH YOUR CORE FOLLOWING, WE ARE LOOSING INTEREST IN YOU BECAUSE IT FEELS LIKE YOU DONT EXIST ANYMORE SIMPLY DUE TO YOUR LACK OF “COMMUNICATION”…

COMMUNICATE AND INSPIRE US AND WE WILL REMAIN LOYAL AND CREATIVE… WE CANT ALL KEEP DEVELOPING ON TOP OF THIS PLATFORM TOGETHER MAKING GREAT SOLUTIONS IF YOU DONT HELP US, MAKE FEEL INCLUDED, APPRECIATED & INSPIRED… HOW CAN WE GET EXCITED ABOUT MAKING SOLUTIONS AS A DEVELOPER COMMUNITY FOR A PLATFORM THAT CANT EVEN ANSWER BASIC QUESTIONS ABOUT THEMSELVES.

STOP SHUTTING US OUT AND GIVING US SHORT BLUNT AND DISMISSIVE “WE CANT SAY” ANSWERS TO EVERYTHING… DONT CLAIM TO BE THE WORLDS MOST “OPEN” PLATFORM AND THEN CLOSE EVERYONE OUT WHO WANTS TO HELP PUSH YOU FORWARD…

COMMUNICATION IS KEY:

1.) dev calls are a shadow of there former selves and obviously no longer a priority.

2.) alex’s commitment to weekly post updates to keep us on the ball - obsolete after 5 weeks.

I THINK YOU ARE WEEKS AWAY FROM A 110% BACKLASH FROM MAJOR ST COMMUNITY DEVELOPERS LOOSING FULL INTEREST AND STOPPING SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR CONTRBUTIONS TO YOUR PLATFORM, ITS CLEAR FROM THE WAY ALL THE MAJOR DEVS AND THINKERS ON HERE TALK ABOUT YOU NOW AS A POSE TO HOW THEY DID 2 YEARS AGO.

COMMUNITY MORALE IS AT AN ALL TIME LOW !!!

Its time to enter the public spotlight and answer some questions, re-evaluate your communication paths to devs and the community and relight the fire in us all before you loose great, creative and passionate supporters.

However i wont hold my breath and i will expect a generic reply to the only sections of this you can joggle to your advantage ignoring the core facts and issues ive pointed out alike many others before me.

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Lol, didn’t realize that I was “apologizing” for anyone. I was trying to suggest that if ST is truly innovating on the stability of the system, providing some measure of the results would be helpful. Without that, we can only extrapolate from what we see here.

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They have shared some stats on system performance improvements.

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That’s a good start, thanks for pointing that post out. Those stats are encouraging, but really only speak to the responsiveness of the platform when it’s working (presumably). I would hope they have a way to monitor when functional areas of the system are working correctly. For example, metrics on automation routines succeeding or failing. Doesn’t really matter if a routine executes quickly if it doesn’t actually accomplish what it’s supposed to.

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Have you stopped for a second and thought this just might be their desired outcome? Lose the advanced community dev and unlimited access to their platform, in return they get a stable platform for the long tail simple users?

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Its such a shame… but most likely so true

This is actually quite interesting. The same sort of business dynamic occurs in gaming (and other technology niches).

Hardcore advanced users and devs are notoriously difficult to please. They also tend to show less brand/platform loyalty, and simply follow the tech/specs/functionality that suits their needs.

Generally, the “dumber” the user base, the less your system’s limits are tested, the fewer Tier2+ support incidents and the broader the customer satisfaction and “wow” perception of the system.

I remember when Grandma didn’t want to do anything on a phone other than make calls. Now, she’s texting, playing games and even managing email. Pretty soon, she’ll be tapping her smartphone on devices around the house to connect them to her HA network.

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I don’t think it has to be an all or nothing mentality. I could easily see that a periodic “culling of the herd” is completely normal. You will invariably end up with a certain segment of your user base that you simply won’t be able to keep happy without a disproportionate investment of time and energy. As you noted, a lot of the folks who latch on to a new technology and help move it forward are the first ones to jump ship for the next new technology when they get bored, don’t feel appreciated, think they’re being ignored, yada yada yada.

I think it is necessary at times to fire a customer, as contrary as that seems to the “customer is always right” montra. Let them go beat up on your competition for a while :).

ST will make their $$ from the mainstream “simple users”, not from the advanced users. It’s a catch 22. The mainstream users need the advanced users to help innovate, but the advanced users need the mainstream to adopt to make the business viable and keep the platform available.

It surely looks that way. There’s nothing wrong with trying to improve stability, but when it’s accomplished at the expense of new features and actually rolling back existing features (e.g. disabling camera capture, cancelling SmartThings Shield, etc.), it definitely feels like SmartThings as an “open platform” is suffering the “death by a thousand cuts”.

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ST is still open, they just don’t support the openness. It’s been a slow changing mood for a while now, and now you get e-mails from support that start like this:

Thank you for contacting SmartThings, I’ll be happy to assist. I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble with some of your Zigbee devices. Which devices in particular are you having the trouble with? If you’re having trouble with officially supported devices I’ll be happy to help.

As the future of a company bought by Samsung, I get the change. Openness brings more crashes than advances. Most of the people don’t want to tinker or come to this community. It’s just a shame for us users that actually came here because it had all those great capabilities.

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I have a Windows phone, I’m a customer too. Thanks for your lack of concern over the broken promises. I’d settle for an online interface. Good enough for CoRE, why not the rest of the platform? And really? Less than 1%? Wow that’s amazing, as a Windows phone user I’ve never heard that one.

http://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os;jsessionid=52A550B8CA49194A5AA0D2802604D610

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Less than 1% is still over 3 million Windows phones sold each year.

It doesn’t mean it would be cost-effective for a company to service that market, but it’s not a small market.

In contrast, the pebble watch sold less than 3 million units altogether, and I don’t think anyone would’ve been surprised that there was a third party SmartThings app for that.

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