On the verge of returning (not so) Smart Things

Devices & Integrations
1

Having serious issues with Smart things!!

Set it up 2 days ago and all presence sensors constantly present and all Android phones present?!

All i can do is switch a light on and off.

I have reconnected all the devices untold times and still the same problem. Not much use to me if it constantly thinks everyone is in.

I tried to set it up from scratch by deleting all devices and the hub but now when i set it up it cannot find any things at all regardless of pressing the sync buttons etc!!!

If no one here can help then its going back to the shop!

2

may want to contact support@smartthings.com first, and then after you’ve given them an opportunity to address your issues, return it.

there have been a ton of reports of presence not working properly, seems like for much longer than it should have been.

3

Sorry that you are having such a hard time. Presence sensors (especially using the SmartApp with a Phone) are problematic. I use Life360 instead for Mobile Presence sensors, and ST Presence Sensor tags for my home. The ST tags work for me, but it takes some time to adjust and test to assure that they are working reliably. Life360 works well for the Mobile side of things, also while I do not use it for our home, I understand that IFTTT works well for many.

HA is not plug and play, there are many issues that can cause problems, like many did not realize that the ST Presence Sensors are Zigbee which uses 2.4 ghz band (same as your wi-fi) and due to this wi-fi interference can affect them.

Once you have the Hub setup, a couple of things you can try is to move it away from your router (max length of the cable provided) assure placement is close to center of your home.

In the Hub IDE (https://graph.api.smartthings.com/) you will need to setup a developer account, and then under the website you might want to experiment with the settings for presence sensing.

Go to the IDE above, go to My Hub>at the bottom of the page you should see View Utilities. You should see presence timeout there. This will allow you to adjust the setting up and down as needed.

Also, where are you located? If in the UK this is an ongoing issue there with ST.

Upfront, HA is still a learning curve for many, and ST is still Beta IMO. But, I have grown to love it, and use it for my home in it’s enterity. If you are looking to do an alarm, it will work but understand that due to the cloud nature delays can happen, and if not setup wisely can cause more pain than help for the customer.

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I actually ordered SmartThings before I knew it was totally cloud based. While waiting for it to ship I discovered these forums, and was concerned about its reliability. I called to cancel, but was assured it was solid.

That was over two years ago and it has never been solid, and its worse now than it has ever been. Many promises that never seem to see the light of day.

That’s as helpful as I can be. Many will tell you to be patient; that things are coming. Seems two years hasn’t been enough… so I have no clue how much longer it will take.

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5

Why? So you can wait a week for them to tell you to delete everything and reset up from scratch to see IF that addresses the problem. That’s the standard response these days. Tier one support does not know what is wrong, and can’t direct you to a solution, and good luck having anyone higher up getting back with you as it seems like everyone is simply overwhelmed.

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6

The trick is that they are overwhelmed. It is obvious that they are going through growing pains, some of it related to the Samsung Purchase, and others related to management not managing correctly. I know that the people behind the scenes have put their heart into keeping things going etc. But, it just seems that ST doesn’t listen and doesn’t multiply what they can do with the community. We are all willing to pitch in and to work to resolve the issues, if they would just let us help.

I still think ST is fine, despite the random issues at time. I knlow that they will eventually work out the bugs, just would like to see more coordination with the people affected the most their customers along with better communication on what is going and and being done.

7

i was trying to be somewhat less negative than usual, and figured telling him just to return ST was not the “right” thing to say on an ST forum. but yea, it’s now been months of being “overwhelmed” on the helpdesk - either fix the @#$% problems so your desk isn’t getting slammed, or hire the appropriate number of people because it doesn’t seem like the number of problems is getting lesser or service any better/more stable.

perhaps a “reboot” of the entire support management team may be in order

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8

Yes. But my recommendation to the OP is return it and wait. Wait for SmartThings to figure it out. Or until something better comes along. It is unknown which will come first.

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9

Oh, c’mon, enough of this growing pains nonsense. It sounded cute 18 month ago, but now it sounds like a lame excuse. More than two years on the market, more than a year after acquisition by a consumer electronics giant and two month after the second major hardware and software release and expansion into overseas market. If this is not a grown up company, then I don’t know what is.

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10

Sorry this isn’t working for you… I’m still very new here, new hub delivered in Sept… IMHO, If your intention is anything other than a hobbie, send it back… :slight_smile: This is not ready for primetime but a techie’ s dream…

11

Have you tried just testing it down to one device at a time? Maybe just one phone or one presence sensor?

12

Mine is consistent and reliable. I’ve been very happy with the product. 49 devices in with plans for more.

13

Same here. Doing my best to help out but without having the same experiences it’s hard to know where to start.

14

I totally agree.

Unless a business is in a stagnant or muture market, then success is dependant on constant adaptation and growth. SmartThings had 7+ months to staff up the Support team in time for the rushed V2 launch. If they weren’t able to release a bug free and supported product, then it should not have been released. It’s not technical failure, it is an embarrassing failure of strategic management and execution.

There are much more complicated platforms out there than SmartThings (especially with less than 200,000 users). Many of the technical problems are complete jokes (unable to resize the photo header bar in Android App?).

So even as the technical bugs get squashed, the underlying organizational failures are not going to correct themselves.

Samsung should cut their losses and sell SmartThings to someone with the competence (and desire) to run it. That’s likely in the picture one day…

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15

I’ve wondered about this for an awfully long time. I’d really like to know why some things have been broken for so long, and what is causing the continual corruption issues.

16

Hi @perryd84,

Sorry to hear about the problems you are seeing. I would recommend contacting our support team. They are the best support team I have ever worked with, and most people here would agree with that statement. They can definitely help get you sorted out.

17

Careful with the clipping of stuff you quote from me, Scott, please…

I said: [quote=“tgauchat, post:14, topic:29731”]
Many of the technical problems are complete jokes …
[/quote]

There’s a tremendous fundamental portion of SmartThings that is amazingly architected, engineered, and implemented. It is a complex problem overall, particularly in offering a public API.

It would be an interesting (and laborious!) exercise to review the entire system from various angles … conceptual architecture, operating environment, APIs, client platform, IDE, app design, etc., etc…

Some of these are very strong and still getting better. Other areas were perhaps not as strong a foundation as necessary for scaling and flexibility, and that legacy foundation has proved to be difficult to shore up – when those portions probably ought to be completely replaced.

That said, there are absolutely some parts of the system that are incomprehensibly awful (with apologies for being being terribly blunt here).

Most of these “bad parts” are really little things (I gave the Android picture scrolling as an example – not to pick on anyone) … but I’m not judging … I’m saying I cannot comprehend how that tiny but noticeable shortfall was not recognized nor fixable before release.

Picture Steve Jobs storming around a conference room asking why the font size on a certain page isn’t scaling with everything else. Apple fusses over the sound that a mouse makes rubbing against a table top when they changed the weight of the mouse for a new battery type! That’s post-Jobs … but it shows an attention to detail vastly different than SmartThings.

As for bigger issues like the instability of the scheduler and lack of migration tool upon Hub V2 launch… That’s what I refer to as lack of management commitment to resolution.

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18

the big bad part is that custom device types smart apps etc, cannot run locally as you take the risk of bricking the hubs…
I have many custom device types and smart apps I wrote that run great. but if smart things pushed these to other uses along with other peoples it is dangerous… maybe we could take the risk with a checkbox that alleviates them from blame if we brick the hub.

but I don’t see a good solution because without this kinds stuff running locally it will never perform the way we want and need.

19

If SmartThings wanted to make everything 100% reliable they could. They would need complete control of the platform. Code, devices, functionality etc etc. Much like the Apple mentioned above who has strict controls over many aspects of the platform. But then none of us would be buying it because it would be severely locked down like many of the other platforms.

In my opinion. Anyone who uses custom device types, custom applications, unsupported devices and unsupported integrations has no room to complain. Because of the complexity of the entire system there are so many things that could possibly go wrong. The only issue I’ve had is with the Wemo integration. However I cannot blame that on SmartThings as I have no idea what’s changing on the Belkin side. Either side could make a change that breaks the integration. Again these systems are VERY complex.

If you want all of the existing functionality you have to be willing to accept that many things can go wrong that SmartThings has no control over.

20

bs… because that would be true if that is the issues we are seeing… as mentioned previously 99% of the issues are back end server scheduling issues such as routines failing to run or running and not doing anything. etc. etc.

this has nothing to do with custom device types or smart aps

in fact one of my custom device types fixes a bug like this… where the presence sensor suddenly says you were home again hours after already being home, with never leaving, and suddenly rules are firing and your garage door is opening and your security system is disarming in the middle of the night… no reason for a state change when you were already in that state. I modified the presence sensor device type to fix this.

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