I’ve been a user of SmartThings for over a year now and experienced the occasional high and many, many lows of watching the platform grow. Its gone wildly unreliable to flat out broken (remember when presence sensors broke completely for several months!?!) but gradually its got better and better as the months have rolled on, and the focus on stability and performance really does not seem to be paying dividends.
I’ve noticed of late that I barely think about any negatives of my SmartThings setup and everything “just works”. Sure, I don’t have the most complex setup, but I do have presence sensors (the greatest strength and biggest weakness of the platform IMO), lights, motion sensors, nest, CCTV, Nest, Alexa and some other bits and bobs working really nicely together. I went through a period where I’d never recommend ST to anyone else (unless I really disliked them and wanted to see them suffer) and refused to invest any further into the platform, but that’s all changed now and I’m getting more and more happy with the service month by month.
I just thought I’d post a bit of positivity and thank the staff for the hard work and efforts in making ST a usable and genuinely fun platform to be involved with.
I have a relatively complicated setup with ~60 CoRE pistons. I have not had a system issue caused by SmartThings since April. I’ave had two devices fail since then but both can be replaced under warranty. I would now whole-heartedly recommend it to friends.
My only gripe is that the main iOS App still crashes a lot despite massive App performance improvements, but I wonder how related this is to CoRE being close to maximum codebase and the (large?) number of pistons?
I can honestly say the Android app has been flawless. its never once crashed, hung or even stuttered for me on either my Nexus 5 or S7 Edge. Like you say, that could be due to your increased complexity or just the Android app is somehow more stable? There does seem to be a lot of grumbles from iOS users of the app but comparatively few on Android; but then that could just be me?
I agree the stability and responsiveness of the platform have improved drastically. I’d say once local devices can actually run locally then I’d recommend it. It is still just too unreasonable to have your house’s ability to function contingent on an internet connection.
I am very new to this, i purchased one of these last night,
worked perfect straight out the box and my wife was very happy turning the Christmas lights on and off all night, and this morning haha.
Can I ask what CCTV set up you are using, I want to set a camera on my garage wall facing the back of the house,
I want this connected to a sensor so that it records onto my nas drive when motion is detected but i cant find a decent camera that will record instead of uploading to the cloud.
not keen on the ones with micro sd option in case they pinch the camera.
I bought the samsung smartcam hd pro but had to take it back as i couldnt record from it.
It has definitely been much better. I still don’t recommend it to every person, though. I approach it like I do cell phones. If the person doesn’t need/want to tinker and doesn’t mind being in a closed eco system, i send them the Wink or Apple iPhones route. If the person doesn’t mind tinkering and taking the initial pain to setup, Android and SmartThings for them.