I got my SmartThings yesterday. I added my hub, an outlet and one presence sensor. A couple of things (heh):
The display for my outlet seems to have little relationship to what’s actually going on with the outlet. For example, it’s not even plugged in and it shows on. Before I unplugged it, it was off.
I’m trying to add an Aeon multisensor. In the directions on the Knowledge base page there is this instruction:
In the SmartThings app, under Controls and Devices, tap the “(+)” at the bottom of your device list.
In the Android app there is no such thing as Controls and Devices. I assume they mean My SmartThings. When I go there and push the + within the circle I get the list of things to add. I assume I should push the “Other Devices” thing. I do, but nothing happens. I can push the others and pair devices, but nothing happens when I push the “Other Things”. FWIW, At the top is an endless spinning circle which says searching.
I’m using the Android app on my tablet - and I would like the app to know that and switch to landscape mode. On my 9" tablet I can hardly read the fonts on some pages. I can’t imagine using this on a phone.
Oh and when I try to add a device it stops my music and fails to start it again.
Sigh - 29 days left to decide if it’s this or my Vera.
Dave… bummer that you’re disappointed. I love my SmartThings and I think that you, eventually, will too.
Bear in mind that the Android app is still, unfortunately, in Beta. ST realizes that they are way behind in Android development and are working hard to get it up to snuff, but obviously it isn’t there yet. Most of what you’re talking about here is directly related to it being still Beta:
No landscape. They haven’t implemented that yet, though I’m pretty sure it’s coming.
Font size set for phones. While the tiles themselves will adjust in size to fill the screen (three wide, 4 or so tall), the font is a fixed size. It’s perfectly usable on a phone, but on a tablet it ends up looking quite small. ST was considering disabling tablet support until they have a more polished product, but I along with others urged them not too. My wife uses a tablet to interact with ST so I didn’t want her left out.
Devices not always showing correctly: This is a problem that ST is work on fixing and with each new version it does seem to be happening less and less. However if you see persistent problems with the device not displaying on or off correctly you should definitely open a ticket with support by emailing them.
Adding a new device: This is a bit confusing because it does seem like you should push a button on this ‘adding’ page to add your device, but that’s not actually what you do. Once you press that “+” that places your hub into a pairing mode. It’s now listening for new devices. At this point you need to mess with your device to try and get it to talk to the hub. This is usually accomplished by doing something with the device… like turning on/off/on/off a switch a bunch of times. With an open/close sensor, open and close it a bunch. At some point you should see one of those lines (for your sensor it would be the ‘other’) line turn green, indicating the hub and device saw each other. Now when you press back it’ll show up in your list of devices in the device matrix.
I also just switched from Vera and I have been very impressed. The interface is much more intuative and user friendly (I am using the iOS app so that could be the difference).
For pairing the Aeon multisensor, once you have the spinning “searching” circle you don’t have to press anything else in the app. At that point, you need to press the black buttom on the multisensor. This is fairly similar to the way it was done on the Vera. It succesfully paired the first time on Smart Things but took several tries on the Vera.
Thanks Blake and Chris - Regarding the Aeon - I ended up excluding it from Vera and it paired with SmartThings. Of course it paired immediately and I decided to remove it to “watch” it pair. Of course then I ran into the issue of it not really being removed. I chatted with Ryan online who was very helpful (a huge plus for ST’s).
Pretty much all of the issues you’ve mentioned are due to the Android app being in beta. Ironically, that is why they delayed so long before releasing it, knowing people wouldn’t take the beta tag seriously and would give the platform as a whole harsh criticism.