The sophomoric responses from the handful of platform adherents here when someone gets fed up with ST’s poor reliability is interesting. It’s a $100 gadget that will be replaced by a $50 gadget from some other company within a couple years. How much ego do you really have invested in this?
You know what I haven’t had since I moved all my stuff to Wink?: A single missed event. Not one. The local processing has been 100% reliable. The app is about as reliable as ST’s, so no benefit there, but my devices operate when they are supposed to - every time - even when the recent wind storm knocked out my internet for three days.
Are the competing options “better” than ST? That is a very difficult question to answer objectively. Subjectively, in my personal experience, ST is in serious trouble if they can’t get a grip on things. At no point in the seven months I used ST was it reliable. It was a constant guess as to if it would work. Their competitor has been 100% reliable for me.
I sincerely hope ST finds a way to improve their platform. I do. The community here is a trove of info. It would would serve that community well if it could park the brand loyalty and recognize the very real issues that are driving users to switch to competing products, whether the community wants to acknowledge those products to be valid or not.
Interesting as I’ve been an ST user for about 1.5 years. Aside from the occasional issue with my Chamerlain garage door, the product has worked flawlessly. I know I don’t have a lot of integration (handful of lamps, light switches, HVAC, open/close sensors, and my garage door). But hell man, it all works great!
I’m glad Wink is working out for you, but I assure you, there have been numerous issues with that platform (the user group is full of issue after issue) and I left it because Wink as a company sucks and I was having a ton of issues since a firmware upgrade in November. You couldn’t pay me to go back to Wink. Don’t mistake this as blind loyalty to SmartThings; I think ST largely stinks as a company too, but their communication IS better than Wink’s and being an open system, I don’t have to rely on them like
I had to rely on Wink. I don’t understand how Wink is even in business at this stage - the ecosystem is complete junk and personally, I’ve seen MANY more Wink users switching to ST than the reverse.
I’m also happy to hear that wink works well for you. I’m confident too that it wouldn’t be that hard to find people that are as fed up with wink as the OP is with ST. Most of the posts above essentially acknowledge that every platform has its problems (ST included), so the likelihood of finding a magic bullet elsewhere is pretty low.
And many of the people that posted above have had no problem laying into ST in other topics because of problems they’ve experienced. How do I know that? Because this is a community, where there’s constant back and forth among members. The fact remains that the OP apparently made absolutely no effort to engage this community, maybe even solve some of the issues he was having, over 18 months. Just stood on a soapbox, cried a couple times, then disappeared. For what purpose exactly?
Damn… a little harsh man. I’ve been on these forums quite a bit since v1, but i don’t post that often. I do think it is funny, how he comes in to say… “goodbye”, only reason to do that is if you were selling non-compatible devices.
But, that is pretty rough there on him, when ST performance has been questionable at best, but i’m still sticking w/ it because of its flexibility.
So his complaints aren’t valid because he didn’t spend his time posting in a forum? You do realize that there is also a FB group, right? And at no point are you required to use the forum to communicate with Support.
There should be no expectation that a consumer must engage with a user forum in order for a consumer ready product to function properly. If that is the expectation for this product, then it should be sold with DIY developer boards and RasPi kits in gadget shops, not on the shelves at Home Depot.
My sophomoric response was on reference to this is the third thread they have started about how much ST and/or Android app are the worst thing in the world and how they are moving to a much better platform.
It is easy enough to view any forum member’s post, visit history & when every post since June of 2016 is about how they are leaving, I really have to question the sincerity.
Unless they never knew about the forum , how does someone that joined in 2016 compare V2 platform performance to V1 when V1 stopped being sold 2015 ?
Do they even have ST or are they just trolling in here to get affirmation on how bad it is.
No, but he did spend time to post on this forum, “so long and thanks for all the fish.” And most of us just want to know which platform he feels is better, because as a community, we share information, not brand loyalty.
That said, I really can’t complain about ST, but I am always open to the next better thing if it’s out there. I just hadn’t heard what it is. As for your experience with Wink, it sounds like it’s been like my experience with ST. And your experience with ST sounds like reviews of Wink from users that left the platform prior to your adoption.
I just want to assure the community that if I encounter something better, I will share it and I will be objective about it and not drop a grenade on the forum to achieve some false sense of satisfaction.
Exactly. If anything useful is gonna come out of this topic it could at least be about which other platform is worth switching to. But here we are instead.
There’s been no newcomers on the smart home scene in the past two years. In fact, quite a few of the old ones went under - Staples Connect, Quirky and Ninja Blocks. The only ones still holding up are Vera, Wink and Iris. There’re also a few hubless systems, e.g. HomeKit. Not too many options and probably will be even less in the future.
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tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
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I was going to say OOmi Home… but, though they’ve delivered some stuff to some IndieGogo backers, their shop is definitely still “pre-Order” (June target).
And they laughed at me when I said their 6 month delivery IndieGogo Rewards ETA was deceptive. It has taken over 18 months; and counting…
It ain’t about brand loyalty. Heck, I do many of my automations in Tasker. I’ve said previously that I see ST as but one component in my overall smart home configuration. But I do know that virtually every other smart home system in this price range also has issues, and I know these systems are essentially still in infancy.
But to badly paraphrase Yogi, if the guy doesn’t wanna use SmartThings I’m not gonna try to stop him.
I agree in general, and I think the main point holds, but there are a few exceptions around the edges.
Insteon and homeseer are still in business, and insteon is sold at Sears and Walmart. So they’re still players, although not as mass-market as wink and Iris.
As far as new players, there are some coming from the security side. Abode obviously, but Asus also just announced a new system. The Honeywell lyric system is new in the last two years and is going to be interesting to watch, as they will be add IFTTT and HomeKit compatibility later this year. Lyric is very much a DIY product, and it gets good reviews at Amazon and Home Depot.
All of these are much more limited systems than smartthings or even wink, but they are aimed at the mass market consumer.
i’m still fascinated by the Z wave alliance statement at CES this year that two thirds of zwave devices are professionally installed. That appears to mostly be driven by Xfinity home, AT&T digital life, and the other cable company offerings. These offerings have definitely expanded significantly in the last two years, adding well over 1 million households.
And then there’s echo. It doesn’t get counted in the home automation controller category, and shouldn’t be, but it’s definitely introducing the idea of home automation to a lot of people and its sales continue to grow.
So “do it for me” services are growing rapidly. Baby steps offerings like Amazon Alexa are also growing. But the DIY hub and devices rules engine model, as you point out, just has turned out to be too complicated for really wide adoption. People aren’t picking up these systems at Home Depot or Best Buy and installing them as a weekend project, the way a lot of industry analysts predicted three or four years ago.
I’m not sure where the future will take us. I’ve stripped down my own requirements considerably, as I’ve mentioned, which isn’t what I had expected at all when I first started all this two years ago. I’m not ready to start paying a cable company a monthly fee for home automation, but I’m a lot more comfortable recommending that as an option to some of my neighbors, especially the ones who already pay for security systems.
I think the next three years in the industry are going to be particularly interesting. The technology is real, but it’s the business model that is still in the early stages. A lot like video streaming four or five years ago. Now a lot of homes have streaming devices and there are a lot of different subscription services available. I don’t think anyone was predicting that 10 years ago.
Hilarious. The great thing about ST is how open the platform is. We want more, such as access to video apis and picture storage, for example. But it’s still pretty open. . . . But it’s not something that I could recommend to my mother. . . .
[If there was an good open source alternative with a comparable amount of community generated integrations, I’d switch. I’d much prefer to host my own IoT server with completely open software. . . . ]
On Nextdoor, many people in my neighborhood are buying Mr Beams lights. That’s fine. . . Some have move to Iris. But they are a long way from doing much with ST. . . .
I have no idea how this will shake out. It’s not clearly a generational thing. Most millennials are not really technologically adept. They just rely on Apple stuff to work. They are nearly helpless when things go wrong. The market won’t change much with the next generation.
Most residential alarm systems offer Z-Wave integration option these days. This may account for a great deal of professionally installed Z-Wave devices. See, for example, Honeywell Lynx:
The Z-Wave connectivity module lets installers integrate security, lighting, thermostats, water valves and more – for local and remote control. With Honeywell Total Connect® Remote Services, users can control security, thermostats, lighting, locks, receive alerts and more from most smartphones, tablets and computers.
I think the future, if it is to exist, has to be voice control. I’ve stated this previously but it bears repeating: while it’s fine right now for us hackers to spend hours building automations, the concept will fizzle unless someone figures out a way to leverage spoken commands to build those automations. It’s simple in my mind, for instance, to say “make the porch light go on when I return home or when my wife returns home IF it’s after dusk, then turn it off within three minutes of the door being closed and locked” - but we needed multiple iterations of rules engines here to accomplish it. No “average user” is EVER going to set up ‘pistons’ to do such a thing! From a systems standpoint, we are really in the DOS era, if you will.
For the average homeowner to embrace real automation, it has to get to where that homeowner can tell his system the above sentence - and the system programs all the ‘pistons’ for him.
The true future isn’t voice controlled, in fact the future is where it virtually requires no interaction from you at all, instead machine learning/AI is the future where it learns your habits, routines and intentions at various times in a way that for example, it knows not to turn the light on automatically when you walk in the room when it knows there is someone in there sleeping.
This future is also dependent on better, more accurate sensors including indoor location and sleep sensors etc. A truly home automated installation.
