An update from Ellen on Twitter, following a plea I made to ask them to either update the SmartThings Status page and/or provide some regular updates on these forums to reassure people this is still being investigated:
Hi Richard, thanks for following up and my apologies for the delay getting back to you. I completely understand the concern and I’m sorry that I’m not able to provide more detailed updates. The status page reflects platform-wide incidents, and based on the number of users that have mentioned this on the forum, we can’t confirm how widespread it is. It’s important that we take a systematic approach and investigate each account reporting this issue. At this time, I can’t confirm that the issue others are are reporting on the community are the same that you encountered, or if it’s caused by the same root issue or possibly conflicting automations, custom automations, or even mobile presence reporting incorrectly, so we need to treat each case individually.
I know that this is a really worrying issue and how important reliability is when you use SmartThings to monitor your home, so I’m going to reach out to my leadership today to ask if one of our Community Advocates can provide any public updates. I appreciate all your patience so far and I’ll keep updating you to the best of my ability!
In the meantime it seems more and more people are seeing this so please please make sure you log it with SmartThings via email, Twitter, and live chat, mention this thread, and just make as much noise about this issue as you can to make them realise this is one problem affecting many people. Please include a couple of recent examples in a similar format to the following…
28-Nov-2017 at 07:39
“Notify Me When” SmartApp named “Motion in Garage” triggered in Home Mode. This should only trigger in Away and Night Modes.
…so support can find them in your logs, and try not to update the guilty SmartApp until support have checked your logs because they won’t be able to find it.
Last night, my Schlage Connect door lock(s, I have two) unlocked by itself, after an hour and a half, after I’ve got home. When switched from Home, to Night mode.
What if it happens, when we are not home?
Omg this is just one of many reasons why SmartThings simply cannot be considered a serious and reliable home security system despite it having built in functions such as Home Security Monitor and support for smart locks. This is also another reason why SmartThings need much better communication with their user community when issues like this occur to reassure us that we shouldn’t be thinking about ripping our systems out and installing something more reliable.
It would be a great tragedy to relegate SmartThings to a glorified motion sensing hall light when we get up to go to the loo at night, which is probably the only thing it is currently doing reliably and safely.
I have installed a lock on my steel safety door and another one on the main wooden door(there is one after another, at the same entrance). Now I have re-enabled only the security door and I will monitor it, for the next days. The main door lock, is removed from doing anything “smart”.
I wasn’t home, but it seems like the hub has updated itself, and it is online.
By the way I’m in LA, not in the UK.
As seen in my case, it can’t be relied on to leave the lights on all evening due to the phantom Night mode situation. Since removing Night mode from my affected routine lights are no longer being unexpectedly switched off.
Quick update. Received the following email reply today to another issue I had immediately after the 000.019.00019 firmware update (which hasn’t happenned since so appears to be a one-off) but they related it to the same Mode issue:
Tanya (SmartThings)
Dec 6, 7:16 AM MST
Hi Richard,
Thanks for getting back in touch!
Our engineers are actively looking into this for us. To assist them in investigating this further for us, as soon as you notice a SmartApp ignoring a Mode, please could you get back to me with the following information:
Name of the affected SmartApp/Routine
Mode this SHOULD be happening in
Mode this is ACTUALLY happening in
Time this occurred
Time is critical with this as I will also need to grab Hub logs server side (they reset every 3 hours), so if you could email me very quickly after noticing. This information will help us to pinpoint the cause of this issue and hopefully lead our engineers to a resolution nice and quickly! Thanks in advance!
So looks like they are still looking at this but they need you to send examples to them as soon as they happen because apparently the logs on their servers are reset every 3 hours, which I didn’t know until now.
Hi all,
quick update from my side: I thought the firmware update did some trick and indeed I did not see any issues for the last couple of days.
That was until this morning, when a SmartApp that so far had never misbehaved (SmartRules) triggered wrongly: some lights came on after motion that were not supposed to come on in the current mode.
I immediately opened a ticket with support with all the details recommended above. Let’s see what they find.
Are you still seeing issues? Same or different issues now after the firmware update?
At 7:45 this morning my system went into Morning mode…
At 8:02 an app that is configured to only work in evening and night modes triggered.
Support email sent at 8:30
Hopefully they can see something.
new symptom today: Now the issue also affects routines, in addition to SmartApps. My “I’m Back!” routine executed, even though my house was in “Guest” mode and the routine is programmed not to execute in this mode.
Funny enough, I got all the notifications (“As requested I changed mode from Night to Home…”) as if there was a “parallel mode universe” in my hub, that assumed a different initial mode. The effective mode in the system however did not change and remained in “Guest”.
As usual: reported to support, but so far no feedback.
I’ve been using SmartThings since June, 2017, and have experienced my share of “strangeness”, such as apps executing with wrong parameters, wrong time, wrong mode, etc. Mostly, but certainly not always, I managed to correct the ST strange behavior by saving the settings for the smartapp or routine with the problem. When there are child profiles, save the parent after saving all the children.
i’m not saying this will fix the situation described in this thread, but perhaps it’s worth trying.
For the past week I’ve not had any routines fire in the wrong mode, touch wood.
I initially powered the whole system down for a few days after several threats from the wife then when the firmware update was announced I powered it back up but deleted several routines which had been misbehaving.
Following the update I re added the routines and so far the whole system is still behaving itself. I don’t know if it was powering it down, the firmware update or rebuilding routines that has made the difference or even if it will keep on behaving but for now things are ok.
I still don’t trust it yet as there is no clear indication out of smartthings what actually went wrong.
Same with me, my issues magically stopped but nobody from support ever confirmed they’d done or found anything. Doesn’t fill me with any confidence that it won’t come back as randomly as is disappeared, but at least like you for the time being the other half has stopped screaming at me. Perhaps they should rename it to PlayThings, because with these random issues and no feedback why they’ve happened or stopped it can’t really be trusted to do anything more serious than motion controlled lighting in communal hallways etc. (ie. not bedrooms unless you want to be woken up with bright lights at 4am lol). Sadly I’m having to keep my options open for alternatives, although I’ll give my SmartThings experiment a little more time as I really want it to work. I hear Hive are looking at home security which is great because all my SmartThings sensors are Hive, as a kind of insurance policy in case I need a backup. We shall see.
Just adding my voice to the choir. UK based, my webcore pistons started misbehaving a few days ago after working for weeks, hugely frustrating. Smart lighting pistons now execute day or night routines at random, irrespectively of the current location mode. Based on the customer support response that was recently pasted above, Smartthings are not really taking this issue seriously, and fundamentally discounting it as probably user error. I bet this issue is at the bottom of their backlog as a P4 with low repro, and there’s not much we can do, especially if it only happens in the UK: we simply don’t have the numbers to be a significant blip on their radar - would be very different if this affected the American shard…
Reported this issue to customer service 2 weeks ago. but seems like they are still not able to figure out how to solve it. This is very annoying especially when you are at home but my SHM keep alert me that motion has been detected or my WebCore rule to be activated my alarm/camera.
One more here to report that my issues have magically stopped. Feel a bit silly now after I contacted support and they got back to me asking the same as those above i.e. name, mode it should be happening in, mode that is actually happening in etc…
Wonder whether those who logged a case have had something changed?
I have to say, I have been experiencing these issues all weekend, and a few others too.
it’s seems that modes are being ignored by some apps (I haven’t has any issue with these for about 2 years), and also slow to update triggering some webcore rules on my side that it should not be triggering.
I spoke to soon. Night mode lights triggered today when they shouldn’t.
A friend also pointed out a strange behaviour to me today which I can reproduce. If you have a smartthings motion sensor and hit the refresh button twice it triggers a motion event. I know this isnt directly connected to apps triggering in the wrong mode (or is it) but again this is very odd behaviour from something that has worked perfectly for months previous to whatever has happened in the past few weeks.
Could anyone else with smartthings motion sensors try hitting refresh a couple of times quickly on a sensor that you know won’t be actually triggered by someone moving and see if also see the device fire a motion event.
I got my first hub about a week ago. It’s V2 and I’m in the UK. I noticed my motion sensor is triggering even when I am in away mode and my routine was set to ignore this mode. The notification log shows it triggering and then it updating the lights, even though I can see from the logs the status was away. Also I used the smart app notify me which I had to disable because I had that configured to only notify me if I was away, but it constantly notified me in home mode.
I’m not sure if this has been the case since I got the hub. I feel like it only started happening the last few days, but I can’t be certain.
I want to add my hub is displaying the same behaviour. UK and on 19.19 fw.
I have lights and motion detectors triggering all day long and sending me push notifications! Pistons are triggering in the wrong mode and actions performing when they shouldn’t. I think the problem is part of my system believes it’s in Away mode when it’s not and is showing Home yet Away routines and modes are firing.
Come on support this is driving me nuts. As others have said the SmartThings system is becoming more of a toy which looks good when it works and not a serious platform that can actually do its job.