I was just having a conversation with a pal on Facebook regarding Smartthings, and the negative reviews he’s finding scattered about the internet… My reply, which is the first time I’ve put all of my thoughts in one place, so I’ve copied it in below… Interested to find out if there’s just a few of us negative old gits expecting too much, or if there is a consensus?
Smartthings is in unofficial Beta mate - they have launched it about three months too early IMHO, and it’s going to cost them dearly…I think Samsung need to start treating it as Samsung, and stop treating it as the little side project they brought out that runs autonomously.
Little things - I can’t control my brand new Samsung Smart TV through it,
I can’t link to any platform that requires OAuth, as SmartThings’ system isn’t clever enough to automatically map the app to the server involved (they’ve set up a completely separate server for UK and IE, which means that the web urls developers etc need don’t work.
The mobile app feels very beta-like, and the macros (sorry. routines) are very basic and don’t do what I’d like. Ideally, I’d like to be able to set up a screen or two on my phone so it looks a bit like a Windows 8 interface (I know, but for this I think it would work great)
THEN… there’s the massive kicker… to re-add a device that’s acting up (My Hue bridge wouldn’t announce a new bulb to SmartThings), you have to manually remove every sodding routine that uses that device or take the device off of routines, and remove, re-add the device, and rebuild stuff - In a setup like mine with half a dozen devices, it’s not the end of the world, but in a full setup, I can see this being a clusterf*ck
I do think it’s going to get better, and I think it’s going to be brilliant… But I also think I’m going to get lots of cheap sensors & plugs from fleabay over the next few weeks where people have brought the kit and got pissed off with it.
Buyer beware.
@aaron, how nice would it be to be able to add to the bottom of this when asked for an opinion “But in fairness to Samsung, they are owning the problem and have given a couple of extra bits to expand our networks to those of us that stick with it” - Would change the message massively