Should I come back?

Its been a long while i have been on here, was wondering though how things are in the ST world now? Has reliability improved any yet? I still see very very regularly outage announcements, however I don’t know how that translates to real world use.

I really do miss the ease of use of ST as getting things up and running on my Vera plus its arduous but once running works pretty much flawlessly with minimal execution delays.

I am maybe planning to utilise my ST for some things as it’s easier to configure and will save me time as it’s taken me months to migrate a good 95% of my stuff to vera. But will only do this if the picture with ST is improving, as this is what ST promised was in the works.

So your opinions are very much appreciated. As I am planning ST to control my heating as I don’t yet have a method of control for my Tado heating Like I have written for ST and haven’t yet figured out Luup enough to work out how to do Oauth authentication

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In September we added a page to the community – created wiki for first bug reports. They’re listed by month and type and will link back to the forum discussions. So you can see what people have been talking about recently.

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=Bug:_First_Reports

As for reliability, they’re still working on it, they’re still not there yet. See the following:

And I assume you’ve already checked the official status page. I’m not sure how to get to the one for the UK, but I believe they experienced the same problems that North America did this month.

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I’m on UK server and I’m happy with SmartThings since the day I have it.

UK server has been relatively stable, perhaps due to smaller user based.

I’m on the UK server. My experience with 200 devices was abysmal.

I only have 1/4 of yours, mainly lights and sensors.

What was your main problem?

Yup same here only had the app slow issues

The main reasons I jumped ship was because of the loss of state. Kept forcing me to do over setups that were working. Now I know CoRE came up with a workaround but still needed you to push the fix when you noticed things were broken. And the other issues were the delays in actions sometimes as long as 30 seconds or so (usually on Friday Evenings) . To move to a system where these have not happened for months is a godsend. But the usability of the platform is really bad but the reliability is great

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@Fuzzyligic

The data we have is from too short of a a period of time to have any confidence. The occurrence of things like state loss were spread out over months and in order to have any confidence things have improved in that regard one would need at least double that period of time, at the absolute minimum, to say things have “improved” at all with any confidence that is based in reality rather than raw hope. For reference, we have folks that two weeks after a catastrophic state loss proclaiming “Wow ST, good job things have really IMPROVED!!!”, so caveat emptor, in god we trust in all else we want data…

That being said, I rebuilt in July and I was going on about 75 days without a noticeable issue - keeping in mind the way I have my system setup I certainly won’t notice most failures - until the last few weeks when this issue hit:

Issues will happen, and this one was pretty mild in terms of impact for my system. I know others were hit harder and continue to suffer. Perhaps most striking is that it exposes that monitoring and proactive responses are still not up to snuff and there are clearly still major ghosts in the system that ST does not have a good handle on. So, IMO any day can still lead to a major outage or issue at this point.

TL/DR: While I have been fairly stable day to day, there just isn’t anything to support that ST has achieved operational reliability yet.

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ahh well i was living in hope. but then i spent a long while hoping the same when i was using it heavily as i just could not find an alternative. and to be honest some of my kit has ended up in a drawer as its not compatible with the Vera. but if scheduling is failing again…i may just stick with Tado scheduling and use Ask Alexa for integrating with the Echo as the built in Tado integration is pants. thanks for your honest feedback, it does seem to me like ST will forever be a platform without reliability IMO

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I can only comment on my setup.
I’m in the UK and on the EU server.
Probably about once a week I have one particular light that has a 5 to 10 second delay when turning on with motion.
Usually it is around 0.5.
All my other scheduled pistons work flawlessly when I am home or away.
I have around 25 devices being controlled by ST.

I suppose my setup is not that complicated compared to others that I have seen described on here.

Would I recommend this system?
For how I am using it. Yes.

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They claim to have fixed the app caching issue which is supposed to address peak server loads, but we’ve heard similar claims before, haven’t we? I still prefer Vera for local control, although it’s hard to beat ST for cloud integrations.

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No. You’re just lucky. And that could change at any time. Similar and even less complex setups are failing. It is on ST, not on the user or their setup.

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Oh well. Long may my luck continue.
I’ve been lucky for just under a year now. :slight_smile:

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I hope it continues as well!

And a year of stability backs up “Luck” in that loss of state has no correlation to complexity of one’s setup and has nothing to do with how poorly one’s system is configured. Loss of state happened within a year, and if you were unaffected - it was pure luck of the draw.

:wink:

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On behalf of @JH1 I’m Just going to say this…

99%

99% of the time it’s either working or it’s not… the other 1% the hub is rebooting.

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This pleases me.

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the problems i always had was the do-overs, i had to rebuild my setup 4 times within 1 year because of ST’s cock-ups which amounted to probably about 40 hours of my life each time. at least now i know that if there is a cock-up its mine, there no worse feeling that having to work to clean up someone else’s mess. i think my mind is made up to stay clear

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Oh I remember when you left… things sucked immensely… I almost jumped ship myself.

But things did smooth out. Using for I was able to simplify my system yet do more and grow it to 150 physical devices.

It’s not 100% perfect and there are still glitches, but things are definitely better.

I fully expect more problems and more severe glitches, but I’m honestly ok with that.

It really depends on your level of acceptance.

Do you want to put in the effort to bring that Vera system online and then the effort in adapting in New devices and automations?

Or would you rather put that effort into ST where it works today and maybe works tomorrow… but here you have us, and everyone knows this forum is the :poop:

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I’d also add the feeling of not being in control of your own smart home. With ST, you never know what else might break tomorrow for no good reason. :robot:

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this and Slack are the only thing ST has got going for it, i’ve missed them, sorta want to come back and chat, but i feel a fraud not using the product!

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