So about two months ago I was playing around with swapping one motion sensor for another on the developer site by changing the ID and in the process I somehow got the motion sensor into a broken state. the sensor no longer was visible within my smart apps on the phone. I decided to go ahead and remove the device completely and start over. The sensor still showed up in my device list on the developer page so I decided to remove it here. This is where things went bad. The device removed half way. I could no longer see it in the device list, however it was not able to be re-added because it still existed within the smartapps. I couldn’t see it in the smartapps on the phone, but when navigating to My Locations in the developer site I could still see the sensor sitting in there in the “List Devices” with status of “REMOVED” and and within the smartapps. If I tried to delete the device here I could not as it was still a memeber of the smartapps, but there was no remove button on the developer site to remove the device from those smartapps so I was stuck.
I involved support and they told me that because the device was in this state, the only way to fully remove it from the system was to delete every smartapp that it was associated with. I was shocked. I thought for sure they would have a back end way to remove it from the apps. I talked to the next level of support and they told me the same thing. I explained that just the smartlighting smartapp alone represented about a year of setting up intricate rules. I would rather throw the motion sensor away and buy a new one than delete these smartapps. The support rep was very understanding of the inconvenience this would cause and he stated that he would pass on to the engineers the problem of a lack of a remove button for the smartapps was causing.
Which brings me to today. I was looking around in the developer site and saw that stuck motion sensor. I decided to click delete again, knowing probably nothing has changed. Instead of getting the normal this device is a member of other smartapps and cannot be deleted until it is removed from the other smartapps message, I got a new message warning me that it is still a member of other smartapps but would I like to delete it anyway. I said yes!! and low and behold it is gone. Thank you smartthings for listening and making the experience better.