Pre Purchase Requirement

I would like to buy one of these things but the always on cloud requirement is a deal breaker. If you ever release a version that does not have this requiement email me and I will probaly buy it.

Given that so many of the devices that ST works with are cloud-based, I can see this being a difficult thing to achieve. If you don’t use Hues, Harmony Remotes, etc…then you should eventually get there. For example, all my lights are controlled by zwave switches. So, I should be able to control them all with the built-in Smart Lighting app directly form ST. I also have a Harmony remote and I know that will never work locally because Harmony won’t allow it.

So, unfortunately, I thin the future is always going to have some cloud component. The question then will be how much can be controlled when the connection is down? If it’s still an issue for you, then you might want to look down the path of a Vera or something like that.

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Have you looked at the comments on the product you reccomended. No I don’t use harmony and never will. My TV is a big ass monitor that I feed content too, my medai center is 100 percent where I want it. What i need is lighting control, motion sensor, contact alarms, and various enviromental sensors. I don’t need social media posting, as for remote access I can ssh into my house for remote without sending data to a third party.

If you’re willing to get your hands dirty, you could look into OpenHAB/MySensors.org combo. It would be completely custom, but local control of everything.

Thanks for the feedback @dashoe.

We do have some local processing right now and that will be expanded in the future. One thing to remember is some things require a cloud. As @brianlees mentioned there are some third party cloud solutions we work with that wouldn’t work unless we could communicate cloud-to-cloud.

Second to that, something a lot of our customers like, is notifications and SMS alerts. These also are hard to make happen without some sort of cloud. Whether that be through our cloud or a carriers cloud, like you could do with openHab to get SMS, if you want alerts it is at some point going to need to go into the cloud.

I am going to tack on our privacy policy just incase you are curious about that. http://www.smartthings.com/privacy

You could set the device to local only and allow users to open up some none or all of the cloud as and if desired. This way you would provide service to all customers.

As to privacey polices they are really not worth anything. The only privacey you have is not giveing out information. Failing that putting out so much false information to make the data irrelavant.

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