And yet still nothing appears on the status page to say some customers might experience problems.
This is the reason SmartThings feels like a hobbyist platform to me. Anyone who relies on this to actually operate with the stability of a dishwasher or washing machine is going to be sadly disappointed.
Platform changes or cloud changes are made which causes the automations in People’s homes to flake out or just stop altogether. With no notification to customers, even on the status page. So things which worked fine on Sunday just don’t work on Monday.
Your life is your philosophy.
There’s an old Buddhist saying that “your life is your philosophy.” Meaning you can say whatever you want to say, but you will put your time and energy into the things that are truly important to you. You will live your priorities.
CTO @hagins has said he wants SmartThings to be the last thing you consider when you wonder why your lights don’t come on. But that does not appear to be the company’s working philosophy. Frequent random outages with no explanation unless you happen to stumble over one in the forums. Granted, some of the outages only affect subsets of customers, but the point is it’s a system that cannot be relied on.
The Customer Experience
There are so many things that I like about SmartThings, and so many things that it does better than the competition. But until they put the customer experience first, and that includes the experience of customers who have already installed the system and use it every day to manage their homes, they will never meet their own slogan of “Smart home. Intelligent living.” Because right now you would be very foolish indeed to depend on SmartThings for anything essential.
As always, I’m not expecting perfection. But they have to do better than this, not just in the reliability, but in their attitude towards reliability. They have to not make changes that affect customers’ “quality of service” (QOS) experience without telling people in advance that it’s going to happen and giving them the option to bypass the change until a more convenient time.
If it really is something that has to be done for everyone then it has to be an announced scheduled maintenance. And the announcement has to be at least three days in advance.
And they have to start updating the status page in a way that is meaningful to customers. Not just engineering staff. “Some customers may be affected by…” is the industry standard for reporting cloud outages. It doesn’t matter if the company is aware of the problem, understands it, and is working on the solution. Customers need the information that that process is underway.
Living on a rollercoaster
Oh, well. For anyone who is affected by the routines issue this morning, or the Apple Watch issue, or the dimmer control issue, or the add a user issue, or the SHM notifications issue, or the oauth issue, or the mode failure issue, or the live logging issue, or the disappearing sensor issue (none of which appear on the status page), you have my sympathies.
For those whose systems are running 100%, no problems, I’m happy for you. When SmartThings works well, it’s great. But I’d make sure you have your Plan B in place for anything that’s important to you. 