Reliability issues with SmartThings

Unfortunately, I think you are in the minority with that opinion, especially since “more reliable” is very subjective.

I believe that Staples Connect is more reliable, but essentially a “closed” system.

Ooomi (an IndieGogo project) is taking the same approach: do not offer an API in order to focus on reliability and consistency. Since it does not exist in the wild, yet, I can’t say if this strategy carries any weight.

So we reach the usual conclusion: Unless you are willing to pay much, much more than a “small monthly fee”, then there is no product or service on the market (yet) that meets your expectations, or it requires some other significant trade-off.

And I strongly emphasizeyet”. The market is changing rapidly, and, especially for the sake of prolific Community contributor @JDRoberts; I hope quickly enough for each of us to reach the value level we expect from this industry.

Pretty sure Samsung’s business model for SmartThings is just “cool name, and a couple years of good press.” They already got their money’s worth.

As for what the system is, and reliability: I have now had 4 major failures in the last 48 hours, all caused (according to support) by server side issues. A scheduler failure, an official integration failure, a mobile app something that they then fixed failure, and a not-sure-try-reinstalling failure.

I’ve said this before, but let’s try again: home automation is not new. Zigbee and zwave are not “bleeding edge.” SmartThings doesn’t have any patents that I know of. They don’t even make most of their own devices. SmartThings didn’t come close to their kickstarter vision of connecting every device in the home, not that that’s unusual, just saying. I can’t change the TV to the cooking channel and have the bright spots in the kitchen automatically come on.

The only revolutionary aspect of SmartThings is the price. And they now have competition in the same bracket, notably Iris, Wink, and Staples Connect. Plus other legacy alternatives like Insteon, Homeseer, and Vera. Each has pluses and minuses. And now HomeKit and Weave on the horizon.

But looking just at ST: a “hiccup” (Support’s term) on the server side that provided no notification caused my Good morning phrase to fail to fire–forever, unless I reinstall it.

That’s not a “bleeding edge” type of failure. That may be a business model failure of the original SmartThings, in that they can’t afford enough hardware to service the number of accounts they have. The solution may be in the now-delayed version 2 hub, which moves a lot of processing out of the cloud onto the local device.

All I know is if I rely on SmartThings, my lights don’t turn off at night (Jawbone integration failure), don’t turn on in the morning (scheduler failure), and my lock is unpredictable.

As a quad, I just can’t be that vulnerable. I don’t physically have the option to uninstall and reinstall things every day. Even if it’s “just” using the mobile app.

Maybe this is growing pains–but they’re doing the growing, and I’m feeling the pain. :scream:

So I’m taking support’s advice of uninstalling everything from SmartThings. But I’ll only be reinstalling the things I haven’t found a substitute controller for yet.

I’m open to re-visiting SmartThings in the future. Right now, though, I’m not seeing a failure of technology, just of service.

Just my own experience, if it’s working well for you, that’s great.

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Happy New Year! :wink: may be!

@JDRoberts I totally agree you must do what best suits you but please don’t even contemplate leaving this community. I think everybody here will agree that we are much more knowledgeable because of your posts.

PS: and your love for Alexa.

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another cold shower this morning as my water heater did not turn on as instructed. sadly, I’ve come to expect these little glitches from smartthings.

What controllers are you using? I got Staples Connect and migrated a couple of ZWave switches to it. So far so good, works like a charm. Everything can be controlled remotely over the Internet, but when at home, the app connects to the hub locally. Works when the Internet is down just fine. The app is very snappy and never quit on me either.

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I don’t want to hijack the reliability topic, and since many people have multiple controllers for different reasons, I’ve answered you in a new thread specific to multiple controllers:

No hot water again this morning. But this time I decided to look at my activity log before jumping in the shower.

How convenient. (c;

I’m not sure this is true, if I understand your point. I think most of the failures we see ARE technological. Exactly what flaws are culprit or cause isn’t clear on the outside, we only see the result. If by “service” you mean ST’s ability to deliver the capabilities of the platform 24 x 7, one could say they do that pretty well, but for the “glitches”. Somebody could write a doctoral thesis simply laying out the reliability measures that it would take to accurately assess ST’s service performance. It’s beyond non-trivial. If by “service” you mean ST’s delivered capability relative to their marketing claims, claims of supported integrations, etc, I’d say that’s all a bunch of hot air to begin with, and largely meaningless. Caveat Emptor; however, what’s being bought?

My hub works and I use a free platform service that works most of the time. It’s known to be very unreliable in certain regards, and it’s known to be fluid and not a totally stable platform. All of this has been widely discussed for as long as I can remember. Also, there have been “promises” from ST of improvements over time forever. Nothing’s fundamentally changed. In my opinion ST has improved somewhat over time, although it’s still not what most people would call “reliable”, like say, the Public Switched Telephone Network is reliable.

Unless there’s something really weird going on (always possible), it appears that most of the “hiccups” are caused by insufficient backend hardware to service peak demand. And insufficient staff resources assigned to maintain official integrations.

ST doesn’t seem to know, for example, that Jawbone put out an app upgrade until things that were working stop working.

And the many scheduler failures seem to have a lot to do with timeouts. Which is why the unreliability is so unpredictable. It’s all musical chairs.

If a network would improve QOS with twice as many servers, that to me is a service failure, not a technology failure. The devices work fine, we’re just overloading them.

I leave musical chair games to people who can get out of the ones they’re in. :wink:

Like I said, if it’s working for you, great.

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I don’t think that most retail consumers would consider that the platform is: “known to be very unreliable”, otherwise they would not purchase it (3.8 Stars on Amazon) nor would consumer electronics reviews be net positive (SmartThings is, as far as I can tell, regarded as “best in class” by professional journalists / bloggers, and is a “recommended” vendor).

So while long term members of the Community have appropriately tempered expectations, the market perspective is significantly different. I can only guess that, overall, the level of consumer satisfaction must have a high degree of variance, correlated to many factors, but primarily to complexity of their environment and their ability and willingness to understand and self-optimize.

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Most “mainstream media” reviews are superficial at best. And a lot of them smack of infomercials. Not many reviewers have enough technical expertise and time to write an exhaustive and impartial review. Take for example PC Magazine review that gave SmartThings “2014 Editor’s Choice” award and “Excellent” editor rating: SmartThings Hub Review | PCMag

The reviewer sings praises to SmartThings like this:

The Hub and smart devices interacted flawlessly with every SmartApp that I tested. I gave my wife a Presence Sensor and setup a couple of triggers for when she arrives home each night, including unlocking the Kwikset lock on the front door, turning on the hallway Philips Hue light, flashing a light in my office that was plugged into a Jasco smart outlet, and sending me a push notification. Like clockwork, everything triggered as her car pulled up to the curb.

Meanwhile, anyone who spent at least a week with SmartThings knows first hand that epithets like “flawlessly” and “clockwork” are hardly applicable, that presence sensors are highly unreliable and Hue integration is flakey to say the least. The reviewer also conveniently fails to mention dependency on Internet connection, frequent service interruptions,delays and scheduler failures.

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I agree 1000%.

They are particularly “guilty” of writing equally glowing reviews of Kickstarter and IndieGogo gadgets … even before these campaigns have reached their minimum goal funding, and long, long, long before these have been mass produced (for accurate quality testing) and delivered (since, well, most KS and IGG’s are significantly delayed past “estimated dates” and have diverged from their original specifications.

But…

The point I make is that consumers’ expectations are influenced by these reviews infomercials, and thus, expectations of SmartThings’s “reliability” should be measured against these manufactured expectations.

Unless I am mistaken and the average consumer is actually well aware of the inaccuracy of these reviews, in which case, the average consumer purchases SmartThings with very low expectations?

I don’t know. I bring up this topic repeatedly because our perspective here is extremely tainted by our long term exposure to the product and company, and to each other’s successes and failures. I presume that SmartThings’s product management, marketing, and technical support teams must consider (and observe) what the average novice consumer’s experience is, and that has way more influence than anything our relatively small Community discusses here.

I simply can’t put myself in the shoes of an “average consumer” – I am not such a creature. I can try to empathize and ask my friends and other novices for their opinions. Anecdotally, their opinions tend towards the negative. The product looks complicated (per the user interface), and they have a justified concern that continuing reliability issues are a significant impediment to value enjoyment. While “we” know these are somewhat manageable (“your mileage may vary”), say that does not make for a glowing endorsement.

Is SmartThings risking their reputation and/or the reputation of the entire Smart Home industry via poor expectations management relative to performance? Or does the “average consumer” have a better experience than we think? Or does the perseverance of early-adopters and gadget enthusiasts provide sufficient momentum to carry ST through this “rough spot”?

Conclusion

My guess is that sales of SmartThings are so small at this point that their the impact to their reputation from post-sales experience issues is negligible.

Unscientific states? – SmartThings has 32,000 Likes on Facebook – in the same magnitude as Philips Hue and Wink. Oomi has reached 2000 funders willing to risk their money on a non-existent product instead of purchasing or sticking with SmartThings. These are tiny numbers, aren’t they?

Well – For random comparison: Nest has over 327,000 Facebook Likes. Nest has both established a better reputation out of the gate and has 10x more reason to maintain a positive image. Simplisafe has over 127,000 Likes, BTW.

Just how do you know that this is the problem?

That’s not a standalone sentence. This was the paragraph regarding how I was using the term service failure.

If a network would improve QOS with twice as many servers, that to me is a service failure, not a technology failure. The devices work fine, we’re just overloading them.

If adding more hardware solves the QOS, then that’s my definition of “service failure.” In that case the devices are OK (the case where adding more hardware improves QOS).

My very first sentence in that post said there might be something weird going on, but based on my many discussions with support, they identified most of the issues I was experiencing as “hiccups.” (Their word.)

Do I know for sure these hiccups would be reduced with more servers? Nope, and never said I did. But plenty of companies run similar or more complex services in the US with a higher degree of reliability. Whether it’s cloud based video services, alarm.com, mint.com, utility companies, Google maps, Dragon Nuance, etc, “hiccups” are rare and costs to users are often low.

Remember the initial problem I mentioned: a Hello Home Action set for 8 a.m. that does one thing, change mode from Asleep to Home, failed to fire after running successfully for several months. And support showed no concern about the failure, according to them the servers “hiccuped” and I should just reset the timer manually.

If that wasn’t a musical chairs issue caused by an overloaded system then we have a home automation system that can’t reliably run a daily schedule to set one value.

I could indeed be wrong but my personal belief is that if SmartThings couldn’t handle a simple time based schedule for other reasons then nothing would work. And it would be failing a lot more often for a lot more people.

So my guess is that it’s a scaling issue. Growing pains. But as I’ve said from the beginning, I could indeed be wrong in that guess.

It doesn’t matter, though: whether it’s poor design or bad technology or QOS due to overload, the end result for me is the same. I can’t rely on it.

I use many Internet-based services. Some are by subscription. Some are free up to a certain volume. Some are totally free. The business model doesn’t change my reliability requirements.

Other people will have different requirements, and different means of dealing with reliability failures.

But going back to the CTO’s comments, if my lights don’t go on in the morning, SmartThings is always the first thing I suspect. Not the power company, the GE light bulb, the fixture, the Philips bridge, or my own logic. And over 8 months, I have yet to be surprised after further analysis. SmartThings it always was.

We’ll see if things are more reliable with ST out of the picture.

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Even time has come for me to call it quits I think if I see no improvement in the ST app on iOS. I am miles away from home. Motion sensors are in stuck stage. Doors showing incorrect status. App load is extremely slow. Everyday there is some issue or the other. I love ST, support, the idea… But I have much better things to do rather than trying to figure out what’s going on.

Sunset scheduled event did not trigger. So, now hello homes are gone for a toss too…the only thing reliable for me is the presence. Go figure…

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Sorry for chiming in, but this sounds like nitpicking to me. A failure is a failure. As a consumer, I don’t really care whether it’s caused by a hardware component failure or a software component failure or a server overload. It does not matter. What matters is that the product does not perform as advertised and does not meet my expectations of quality and reliability.

I think we did a guesstimate a few month ago and came up with 50k users ballpark figure. If ST cannot handle 50k users, what hope do we have that the quality will improve over time? It’s only bound to get worse as the number of users grows.

One can only hope that the LOCAL processing in hub2 will solve a great many of these ills.

I’m sure the ST folks are hoping for this :wink:

In the end, the whole of the magic of ST is a great framework on top of some really horrific low energy networking standards (zwave/zigbee) that you could always just code up yourself in Java/C/whatever by replacing the hub with a couple USB sticks on your PC/server.

As funky as groovy is, it sure beats the snot out of coding in Java. And as funky as the ST models are, they are at least as good (and honestly likely 10x better) than whatever models I’d have come up with.

So for me (as a developer) this still is a win. And I too hope that hub 2.0 rocks the crap out of LOCAL event processing and cures the “server hiccup” woes. As any engineer will tell you, yeah - it seems like it should work :wink:

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I hope v2 will be that one pill that cures all, :wink: I love ST and have no intention to switching to any other platform. But it takes too much time as it stands now. Time that I can use for things much more important than HA.

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I think it’s the other way around - a monstrous, buggy, inefficient framework on top of robust and reliable low-energy networking standards.

Back in October-November 2014, a framework upgrade to Cassandra and other “magic bullets” was supposed to fix all the “hiccups” once and for all. And here we are, 8 month later, discussing the same issues and hoping for another “magic bullet”.

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