And as far as webcore, it’s essentially a scripting language for smartthings. Very powerful, but most people won’t need it. There are other simpler alternatives available, including the official features, but they can’t handle rules which are as complicated as Webcore can. So it just comes down to what you were trying to do.
(This is a wiki post: feel free to edit it or add to it as needed. Also, I can’t take any screenshots since I can’t use the app at this time due to its incompatibility with voiceover, so feel free to add screenshots where they would be helpful.)
At one point, one of the biggest advantages of using the SmartThings platform was the wide variety of devices that it supported. However, by the end of 2017 several competing platforms had caught up in that regard.
Where SmartThings still holds a significant advantage over some of the other low-cost home automation solutions is in the ability to really build really complex rules in a fairly simple manner. You won’t have to be a programmer, but you may need the help of other community members to get the logic constructed just right.
Also, you …
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CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.”
Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you.
For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog.
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