Region Problems (Adding household member on new App)

[IanHW]

Over the last several years I’ve set up a medium-small SmartThings arrangement at home, originally using the classic app (Android) and sharing access with my wife’s separate account (iPhone). Apart from the occasional wobble with Samsung servers and location sensing with our phones, everything’s near enough worked OK.

Last year (IIRC) I was invited to I turn my SmartThings account into a Samsung one, did so with (also IIRC) no extra info supplied, and everything continued working.

A few months back I go the “New App” offer, decided to bite the bullet, and switched over to it. A few problems were thrown up, mostly sorted, and while I think the app’s a change for the worse it’s just about acceptable.

Except…when I tried to switch my wife to the new app too and re-enrol her as a household member her phone gave a “Accounts must be in same region” error. Checking our Samsung accounts, she was (correctly) down as being in the UK while I was (inexplicably) in India. Googling Samsung regions it turns out the only way to change it is via a request to support, which I made and now I’m UK-based too.

Unfortunately we’re still getting the "must be in same region error when trying to add my wife as a member. This was re-raised with support, who advised me to try a “Erase personal data” Settings option in the app that doesn’t seem to exist. I re-re-raised it telling them that, and haven’t heard anything back from them for several weeks now.

After a bit more Googling I’m not very sure there is an easy fix for this - someone with the same problem last year was told to delete and recreate their Samsung account in the requred region.

If anyone has any suggestions short of that for fixing this they’d be gratefully received. Alternatively does anyone know how much I’d lose in recreating the account - would any/all of the device info in the home setup be retained?

TIA, Ian

[JDRoberts]

1. several community members have reported that when they went through the migration they ended up in the wrong region. Nobody seems to know how or why it happens, but, yes, it seems like only support can fix it if it does happen.

2. “erase personal data“ was the old name for what is now called “remove smartthings from your account.“ what this is supposed to do is meet European and UK privacy law requirements and delete everything that Samsung knows about your smartthings account. Everything. So once that happens, there’s no way to recover, because Samsung is not keeping copies. You just have to start completely from scratch, including resetting your hub. So you would lose everything that is smartthings related.

It appears, although it isn’t clear, that the reason they changed it to be called “remove smartthings from your account” is they mean from your Samsung account. So your Samsung phone could continue to operate even after you’ve removed smartthings.

.

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So if it was me I would probably wait to see if support can fix things first.

[IanHW]

Thanks for that information - much appreciated.

From what you say the effects of “Erase personal data” are rather more extensive than I’d like; wishful thinking, but I’d been hoping that it was a relatively small clearing of caches at app level, in preparation for a refresh from the corrected online database.

In the circumstances I’ll definintely go with your advice of crossing my fingers and seeing whether support can sort this in a more targetted way.

If not, and I have to rebuild things from scratch in any event…may make the leap to Hubitat, given recent SmartThings issues at most every level.

[mvevitsis (Matvei Vevitsis)]

This region restriction should be removed.
@blake.arnold @jody.albritton

[JDRoberts]

@mvevitsis

This region restriction should be removed.
@blake.arnold @jody.albritton

I agree from the customers’ point of view the region restrictions are annoying. However, we are starting to see these more and more on many different systems because different countries now have different privacy restrictions. One country may require that a company keep records that another country prohibits a company from keeping. It just gets really awkward. So we are seeing multiple apps and systems now requiring that all members be from the same region.

[mvevitsis (Matvei Vevitsis)]

Homekit sharing is not restricted by the account region. afaik

It’s just samsung being stupid like with Samsung pay (google pay is tied to account region, samsung pay is tied to phone hardware region, so it’s very difficult to change)

[JDRoberts]

@mvevitsis

Homekit sharing is not restricted by the account region. afaik

HomeKit is a completely different data model because they don’t have a cloud for the Home Automation information. everything is local except voice control, and that is anonymized before it is sent. So they don’t have company access to what time you turn your porch light on the way SmartThings and other cloud-based systems do.