Removal of Contact Book Feature

Announcements
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We are disabling the Contact Book feature on Monday, July 30. After this date, you will no longer receive notifications that were previously configured using Contact Book.

Creating New Contacts is Currently Disabled
In preparation of this change, we disabled the ability to create new Contacts. If you have previously added Contacts, you should immediately begin migrating away from Contact Book using the steps detailed below.

Why remove Contact Book?
Contact Book was initially released as a concept; there are a number of limitations and bugs which have never been addressed. We are focusing our efforts on enhancing and improving the notifications offered by the new app - which will bring you access to Samsung devices and services in addition to the hundreds of Works with SmartThings products you already use and love.

What to expect
After this time, you will no longer receive notifications via this feature. We encourage you to prepare for this change in advance. Please follow our step-by-step guide in the post below to ensure a seamless transition.

We thank you in advance for your understanding as we create more meaningful experiences for our users!

Regards,
The SmartThings Community Team

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In preparation for the deprecation of Contact Book, please refer to the guide below to ensure you continue receiving notifications once this feature is removed.

Note: This guide assumes that users who have enabled Contact Book are power users who are comfortable navigating the IDE, mobile app, and custom code. There are numerous ways to leverage Contacts, especially with custom SmartApps, but this guide only provides a high-level overview of the steps needed to switch from using Contact Book to regular SMS/push notifications. If you require additional assistance, please contact our Support team directly at support.smartthings.com.

Removing Contacts from Contact Book
Before configuring your automations to use the supported SMS/Push notifications, you will first need to remove any Contacts you have created.

  1. Log in to graph.api.smartthings.com

  2. Click My Locations

  3. If you have multiple locations, click on the name of a location

  4. Click on the link to the right of Account

  5. In the address bar of your browser, replace “/account/show/” with “/contact/”

    For example

    Change https://graph.api.smartthings.com/account/show/123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000
    to https://graph.api.smartthings.com/contact/123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000

  6. For each contact listed, click on the name. Note the automations listed under “Referencing SmartApps” as these are the automations you will want to reconfigure to utilize SMS/Push after the Contact is deleted. You may want to copy/paste this list into a text editor as a reminder of which notifications you previously configured

  7. Once you have noted the currently configured notifications, you can click the Delete button to the right of Edit

  8. When the confirmation box pops up, click OK

  9. Repeat this process for each of your Contacts until the list is empty

Updating Automations to use SMS/Push Notifications
Once you have removed all Contacts from the Contact Book, you will need to configure your SmartApps to use SMS or Push notifications.

Update Smart Home Monitor

  1. Open the SmartThings Classic mobile app
  2. Tap Dashboard Dashboard
  3. Under Smart Home Monitor, tap Everything OK
  4. Tap the gear icon gear_icon
  5. For each configured component (Intrusion, Smoke, Leaks, Custom), tap the name
  6. Tap Next until you see Alarm & Notifications
  7. Tap Text & Push Notifications
  8. If you would like to receive push notifications, ensure the toggle is to the right
  9. If you would like to receive SMS notifications, enter a phone number
  10. Tap Save

Update Routines

  1. Open the SmartThings Classic mobile app
  2. Tap Automation Automation
  3. For each Routine configured with a notification, tap the gear icon gear_icon
  4. Under “Additional settings”, tap Automatically perform “Routine” when…
  5. Under “Advanced Options”, ensure the toggle is to the right if you would like to receive push notifications
  6. If you would like SMS notifications, enter a phone number
  7. Tap Save

Update SmartApps

  1. Open the SmartThings Classic mobile app
  2. Tap Automation
  3. Tap SmartApps
  4. For each SmartApp you wish to receive notifications from, tap the name of the SmartApp and enable push and/or SMS notifications

Updating custom code to remove references to Contacts

Use of Contact Book in custom SmartApps is defined by the sendNotificationToContacts() method. Push notifications are defined with sendPushMessage() or sendPush(). SMS notifications are defined with sendSmsMessage() or sendSms(). If the code guidelines were followed, your custom code should have a fallback to use SMS and/or push notifications such as

//check that Contact Book is enabled and recipients selected
if (location.contactBookEnabled && recipients) {
sendNotificationToContacts(“your message here”, recipients)
} else if (phone) { // check that the user did select a phone number
sendSms(phone, “your message here”)
}

If your custom SmartApp only uses Contact Book, you will want to replace the sendNotificationToContacts() method with one of the SMS or push notification methods referenced above.

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Thanks Brad for the instructions. While not surprising, this still sucks since Contact Book worked well for me. I look forward to the enhancements coming to the new app. Could we possibly get change logs for major versions of the new app posted to this category in the community forum so we are aware when these (and other) enhancements arrive? Right now the only way to find them is to poke around in the app. It may help user acceptance of the new app to have an easy place to find new features to show Samsung is working to bring to new app to parity with the Classic app.

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Thanks for the update @Brad_ST and @Aaron
It’s sad to see this beautiful feature retired and I hope ST finds a way to bring back this feature in future bigger and better.

One clarification:

Apps are also using (as per the docs)

preferences {
 section(“Send Notifications?”) {
  input(“recipients”, “contact”, title: “Send notifications to”) {
    input “phone”, “phone”, title: “Warn with text message (optional)”, description: “Phone Number”, required: false
  }
 }
}

Users of those apps should continue to receive push notifications if coded correctly, however when they open the SmartApp the next time, they will be prompted with a phone input field instead of the contact, is my understanding correct?
If so there should be no need to re-code these compliant SmartApps. i.e. contact input will not throw an (metadata) error, will resolve to false and fallback to the phone input.

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@Brad_ST So does this mean I can’t designate what push notifications I get versus what notifications my wife gets anymore?

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Correct. Use text messages for person specific notifications.

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I always knew this day would come - but I really thought it would only be forcibly discontinued when a comparable way of sending push notifications to specific users was announced.

This kind of says that maybe there will be something like contact book in the new app but then tries to distract me by talking about devices.

I really hope the new app will offer a way to only send push notifications to specific users. I enjoy being able to only use SMS for priority notifications, but also sending myself lots of push notifications that my spouse will get irritated about. So I only send her the ones she told me she wants to opt in for.

I could send her SMS for these things still, but that forces me to also use SMS (to avoid sending her a push) when all I want is a push. Maybe I’m crazy but SMS is more intrusive than push for me.

Maybe we will just disable ST push notifications on her phone and set up SMS for anything she still wants. Then I could still get pushes for generic stuff and SMS to me for priority things. :thinking:

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Or why not wait until the new solution is out before taking this away? It’s Dashboard all over again…

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This is quite probably the worst possible way to transition a service or feature. It is extremely saddening to see that SmartThings does not have a replacement for the feature they’re removing. The contact book worked perfectly for me (and many others) and is an extremely important part of my home automation “wife acceptance factor”. I would humbly ask that this action be reconsidered or at the very least extended to a more reasonable timeline to give us time to migrate our notification designs. As far as I am aware, us early users haven’t even been adapted to use the new app.

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Brad, if a user does not anything (e.g not everyone will see this post), will their accounts automatically return location.contactAddressBookEnabled as false after July 30th?

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I configured contact and use (used) them daily. I tried to follow the instructions and nothing is there.

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image.png2484Ă—834 134 KB

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This really sucks, why not leave it as as “Samsung labs” project so you’re not on the hook for support but people can still use it if they choose to. Works fine for me and I’ve migrated to a samsung account.

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If no Contacts show up on that page then you do not have any set up. If you already migrated your account to a Samsung account then it would have deleted your Contacts automatically. Otherwise, perhaps you had a different account way back when which is housing your Contacts? Regardless, the page you screen shotted is the source of truth for Contacts existing.

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Exactly my situation…

just went through and fixed about 20 webcore pistons…changed them from specifically sending me a push notification, to send a generalized push message. Then turned off ST notifications on my wife’s phone and specified only certain pistons to send her an SMS (text)…(like when the laundry is finished or when it’s time to make me sandwich).

That was an hour of fun!!

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That is correct. location.contactBookEnabled will start returning false after July 30th. (Only caveat is that there will be a little bit of wiggle room after the exact time of deprecation for some caches to clear.)

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So what are my options to only receive alerts from one of my Hubs? I have my parents hub on my account and don’t want messages sent to my phone for all of their alerts. Hence why I used contact book in the first place.

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I already migrated my account to Samsung. Was I supposed to know they were deleted? Weird, I’ve been getting notified anyways. Been using the sendNotificationToContacts(…) in webCoRE. Selecting my phone, not entering a number.

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What other features can we expect to be disabled in the next coming weeks? The ability to toggle anything local? How about signing in to the app in general?

You realize that the majority of people have not yet been migrated over to the new app, so you’re just going to start disabling features that, once again, the majority of people use on a daily basis. You may think that sending text messages is a “simple” workaround, well guess what - it’s 2018. If push notifications weren’t important, then app developers wouldn’t use them.

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Guys guys guys, don’t bother complaining. These guys are top notch experts at customer abuse. Your complaints won’t phase them. They are laser focused on whatever they have been working on for the last 2 years and nothing will stop them. Let’s just keep this thread to support.

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