I’ve been using Smartthings for a couple of years now and initially there were a glut of new integrations and features. This inevitably caused a lot of instability and consequently I reckon about a year or more ago Smartthings concentrated on stability.
I completely understand this and support that decision and the improvement in that area has been very good.
However there have been a real lack of new features, supported products and integrations in the last 12 months (especially here in the UK). As Smartthings doesn’t release any kind of roadmap the only update for new things we have is on here. I remember a post at the start of this year (I think by @slagle) stating that a lot of features and new integrations were being worked on that would be really existing for the users and would be rolled out this year.
Since then, the lack of new things is pretty disappointing. It feels like the platform is pretty static right now in terms of moving forwards and expanding.
I’d love to know the latest on this from the Smartthings team? Should we be expecting new integrations and features soon or is the focus still entirely on stability? I mean new things that affect the UK too by the way…
Glass half full view: They are continuing to work on stability issues and slowly releasing new features such as device health, waiting with each change until everything is stable before making another change.
Glass half empty view: Why would they make any changes when the community keeps writing/building stuff to get around the short comings and lack of new device support? They can jsut keep selling and advertise all the things they support even without officially supporting things (i.e. Ecobee “support” for a year without actual official support, IP camera “support” with only 7 actual cameras listed, etc).
I know this isn’t a great answer but the company as a whole has decided to not promise anything and instead deliver features when they are ready. We continue to focus on performance, stability and other areas that aren’t additional user facing features (for example we have had outages in the last month but the scope has been much more limited as compared to before, where all users would be down) but do recognize that we need to switch gears or risk falling behind. I can say that there are new features that are currently being worked on that are slated for release in the next 6 months though can’t give any specifics.
Note: Sometimes we are known to slip and accidently share info we shouldn’t have in our community slack
At the moment I’d settle for a fix for things that used to work, like, VoiceOver navigation. Three months is a long time with broken basic functionality.
How about adding simple entry/exit delays to SHM? Seems like it should be a trivial change that would really please a huge number of users. This has to be one of THE MOST REQUESTED FEATURES over the past 2 years…
I work on the backend so not at all involved with features like that - your best shot would be to keep making requests to support as that is the only way to give any feedback to product who would then prioritize these things. The more help requests referencing an issue, the more likely it will be noticed and/or prioritized by product (same with VoiceOver).
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
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It’s a shame to face that hurdle when there’s clear demand from the 7000 active Community members (per Discourse stats) or that all customers can be reached by email to be polled on feature requests…
I can imagine a few things above or below exit/entry delays on the list, but counting on folks to use the Support contact for Feature Requests seems to be a significant risk to population sample accuracy.
I know that I personally hesitate to contact Support for any product unless there’s a bug that can’t be solved with a reasonable Google search. Using Support to request features seems unintuitive for me.
ActionTiles uses a feedback & discussion forum so that Feature Requests can be discussed for refinement, be visible in order to stimulate interest, and each can receive an allocation of budgeted votes as a prioritization mechanism. Vote tracking systems for Customer feedback are quite common.
Well, only said support because of a lack of any other option to do so, though social media contacts also work, they will end up in the support bucket as well. Just speaking from seeing it first hand as the only way that I have seen community suggested requests get prioritized but even in that case there are issues that are reported often that don’t get prioritized.
It would be great if the problems that are preventing users with disabilities from using the mobile app were prioritized and fixed by that team, because it’s the right thing to do.
One thing I did was to ‘rate’ the iOS app in the App Store negatively in this area. That resulted in an email response from ST (marketing, I think). I encourage others to do the same…
I think the answers given here are what I’d expected really. The examples given by the users in this thread are perfect examples of quick wins that I can’t understand why Smartthings have not done.
SHM could be so much more with simple delays and the ability to clear alerts on disarm. It’s incredibly simple and quick changes that would benefit a lot.
Another one would be making smart lighting have the ability to use switches on and off as a condition. Pretty simple. This is one where clearly it’s less of a priority as core can do it…so relying on the community.
I totally understand why new integrations like the arlo cameras take time and would strategically not be advertised before being done deals with a beta in place.
But new features rolling out to SHM, existing apps and integrations would surely be at a quicker pace now the platform is more stable? The mobile apps have had a few updates but other than the home page very few real feature additions.
