You can get details about ADT Tools in a few ways…
- You can go to ADT Tools Release thread
- At ADT Tools 2 @ Things that are smart.com
Or just ask me. If there is something that it can’t do i can see about adding the function if possible.
The real problem is that I suspect very few fully understand the nuances for each option you may have. I honestly don’t know how well the Adobe solution integrates, but the concern about cloud involvement is real for anything other then the official ADT functions. Even the ADT Tools smartapp i have runs from the cloud. The importatnt thing from my perspective is that no matter what route you take it doesn’t depend on the cloud to do the basic security functions. Even if ADT Tools is down because the cloud has issues the ADT Smartthings panel will still alarm and notify ADT of a intrusion, fire, or water event. Since Adobe is external to Smartthings for its alarm functions it will work as well. Some solutions actually lean on Smartthings completely like Smart Home Monitor, Konnected.io board, or Noonlight. Those will all be impacted if the Smartthings cloud is having issues.
Think about this. I added functionality to ADT Tools 2 a while back for repeat recordings. The idea being for folks like me that use ARLO that is motion triggered to ensure it records as frequently as possible once the alarm is triggered instead of waiting for for motion detection. I was testing another app with a similar routine to what is used and ADT Tools 2 and found that it would somewhat randomly quit recording when it wasn’t suppose to. What i found was that on occasion the repeat action would take between 30-60 seconds to process. That is beyond the time smartthings allows for methods to run and so the whole app would fail. Most of the time this runs in under a second. Could you imagine if this happened for security and it didn’t kick off. The ADT Smartthings panel takes the cloud out it though so even though my Arlo may be slow to trigger, the alarm will be instant. Arlo actually wouldn’t be slow either since it is really a sepreate system. It just wouldn’t be triggered by Smartthigs.