Almost all, if not all, of my Smartthings drivers are from the beta channel. I don’t believe anything I have installed uses a “production” Smartthings driver on my hub. This is for devices that aren’t custom Edge drivers; the default drivers for typical devices.
Should I still be using the beta drivers? If not, how do I switch??? For a simple “Z-wave Sensor” for example, the only driver available is listed as (beta).
Thanks.
tagging @nayelyz @AlejandroPadilla
I don’t know if it’s correct but I went to the Alpha channel a couple of weeks ago and loaded the corresponding drivers.They over-wrote the Beta drivers I had installed, and no problem.
The ‘beta’ repository corresponds to the ‘production beta’ channel. The ‘production’ repository corresponds to the ‘production default’. Generally updates are pushed to ‘beta’ first and then a week later pushed from there to ‘production’. The drivers have the same ID but they are repackaged when pushed so the version numbers differ.
Only one version of the driver can be installed on your hub at once. The parent channel reflects whichever channel it was last installed from. As you have seen you are only offered installed drivers for switching.
I wouldn’t even know how to get to the ‘alpha’ or ‘production’ channels, or even which is which.
So where does one see the production drivers? And if you have the beta installed, I assume the only way to get to production driver is to delete or change drivers on any devices currently associated with the beta, delete the driver, and then will the production driver suddenly appear?
This is way too confusing…
Hope the link works you
Thanks, but unfortunately the link does not work…
Just edited…
Now giving me a “403 forbidden” message…
I found this link in another thread but it gives me an error when trying to enroll by hub:
Welll, can’t help you much more, but the link is now valid.
When you get there don’t delete anything! Just install the driver, one by one, that you have now in Beta.
There’s no problem with using the Beta drivers, the difference is that they get updates first than the ones from the default channel as Graham mentioned but they have the same configuration.
If you want to get the driver in the default channel, you need to delete all the devices attached to the Beta one and uninstall it from your Hub, then, pair the devices again and this process will download the corresponding driver (from the default channel) to your Hub based on the fingerprints match.
Then why did it work for me just loading the Alpha drivers?
AFAIK, there’s no invitation to access the ones in the default channel to install them directly.
Thanks for your reply @nayelyz.
I suppose there must have been some post on the community, on another topic possibly, which named the Alpha channel (?).
As I am unable to resist investigating I enrolled, and loaded a driver! It seamlessly took over from the Beta driver so I continued with all Beta drivers and finally unenrolled from the Beta channel.
Well it worked perfectly in my case, although as I did preface my reply to the OP, "I don’t know if it’s correct ", as maybe that wasn’t the best way. Better the OP takes heed of what you advise.
Thanks as always for your work.
I had lots of devices using the Zigbee Switch driver which had been installed from the ‘beta channel’ and in the API the entry for the installed driver on the hub reported the channelId as that of the beta channel.
I had long waited for a Sonoff plug, explicitly fingerprinted in a DTH, to be ported to Edge but it never happened. It eventually became my only device to be migrated and it used a generic match with the Zigbee Switch driver but from the ‘default channel’. The installed Zigbee Switch now had the channelId of the default channel.
I didn’t want the Zigbee Switch driver associated with the default channel so I reinstalled the driver from the beta channel and so the channelId changed back.
That pretty much illustrates what is going on. Drivers are uniquely identified by their driverId and version. Two drivers with the same driverId are ‘the same driver’ but there may be multiple versions of that driver. The version is basically a date stamp of when the driver package was uploaded to the API.
Only one version of ‘the same driver’ (driverId) can be installed on a hub at a time and it is associated with one particular channelId where it was installed from.
The default channel is a special case. Hubs do not have to enrol in the default channel and I don’t think there is any mechanism for them to do so. So if you have a driver installed from the ‘beta channel’ you can overwrite it with the same driver from the ‘alpha channel’ or any other channel that the hub is enrolled in. What you can’t do is overwrite it with the same driver from the default channel as you aren’t enrolled in that. The only way to get to that is to remove the existing installed driver completely which means removing your devices. Then when you add new devices the driver from the default channel is automatically installed for you.
Clearly it is possible to overwrite the installed driver with one from the default channel because the migration process did it, but that doesn’t mean the punters can do it.
A good clear explanation 
