I’ve only just received the updated app, and only on one phone. This device is a limited access ‘control only’ so I’m only seeing some of the lowlights of the changes so far.
I am particularly irritated that, having carefully crafted all the wallpapers of my rooms on different mobile devices and Locations over a period of months, they’ve all been splatted by the insipid new wallpapers.
One of the quirks of ‘control only’ is that you get the Home Monitor app regardless of whether you can actually use it with the devices you have available to you. So it could be it is unusable and for me it is. Fortunately the Home Insights Dashboard exposed the Security Mode. So it is a pity that the Dashboard seems to have vanished completely. I see Media Output is an option in ‘Favourites’ but that’s all I’ve encountered so far except for an ridiculously massive Offline Devices tile. I’ll presumably see more when my admin phone updates.
I’m not yet being offered the Android update via Google Play or the Galaxy Store yet, but I’m looking forward to check out local access as well.
As for SmartThings the Home Monitor, I stopped using it years ago after the migration to Edge since it’s always been a cloud only app which is why I use Virtual home security switches instead.
In the iOS app, they appear to have removed the offline devices tile that was on the dashboard. It could be that I simply haven’t found where they moved it. They did move the low battery tile to the larger tile that I would like to close since it takes up so much space. It is not good, if I need to go room to room looking for offline devices.
I once found that the Security Mode used to disappear completely from a Location if the Home Monitor app was deleted, so ever since I’ve accepted its presence.
The relevance in this case is that the Home Monitor UI in the mobile app can get badly confused in limited access accounts. It’s not the only thing. Room summary tiles seem to be user or app specific when they really should be Location specific and that makes them a bit ridiculous when the user doesn’t have specific access to the devices (why should it be needed?).
I’m still waiting to see if room summary tiles still exist, but it does appear that access to Security Mode without a working STHM has been lost.
Sounds like the Offline diagnostics tile that I saw. I was going to screenshot it but I had set it not to show a normally offline hub. However now I can’t change it back because the settings are only there when the tile is displayed. I can’t find an equivalent of the old Home insight settings where I can access the settings for dynamic tiles.
Update: I found the setting in Offline diagnostics on the Menu tab. Which I suppose is fair enough really.
It turns out you now only get to see the tile if the SmartThings Now function is enabled (it’s in Edit Home tab), and that is the first thing I turned off because I really dislike the ‘suggestions’.
If you close a suggestion in SmartThings Now it isn’t shown again and so you can remove all the suggestions and the tile will disappear. Perhaps surprisingly you can also dismiss the Offline diagnostics warning in the same way. Presumably the suggestions cycle will restart at some time.
Offline diagnostics on the Menu tab makes a point of saying something needs attention but curiously nothing highlights that on the Menu page, and nothing highlights the Menu page (so no dots as we used to see).
Offline diagnostics in the menu tab doesn’t actually list all my offline devices. I have 3 devices which are actually offline and none of them show in the offline diagnostics tab. And they aren’t excluded from it in the settings either.
I much preferred the offline devices count as an icon in the dashboard where when you clicked it and could see all offline devices with an option to exclude them.
The other more clunky approach to see offline devices is to pick the “manage hubs” option and then click on your hub and scroll to the very bottom where all offline devices are shown. This is a far more user hostile ui.
Strangely enough this is unable to detect a device (Zigbee paired to ST hub) that in my case is offline, and is detected when I try to use the Unify Thread Network function.
I’ve not got the updated app on a full Location yet so I can’t get a good feel for what they’ve done with all the other summary tiles, including in rooms, something that I thought had a lot of untapped potential.
I noticed that the updated app had turned feature suggestions back on in the app settings. I can’t tell if disabling them again removes the suggestions from SmartThings Now, only if it doesn’t. It does seem ridiculous that they put a potentially critical alert like Offline on a par with gratuitous plugs for unwanted (by me) service apps. Especially when you can dismiss the tile and end up with no notification for offline devices at all.
I don’t know why I care really. It isn’t as if I use the mobile app from one day to the next.
I’ve turned ‘Full access’ back on for the moment so I can see what is going on.
I can now see that the static elements of the old Dashboard have been migrated to a separate large Dashboard tile that can be move around with the Favourites, and that the room tiles still exist. The various remaining components of the Dashboard can be configured in Edit Home tab.
It rather appears to me that the dynamic tiles, those that only appear when there is something to report, are now appearing as notifications in the space at the top of the Home tab reserved for SmartThings Now. This does mean that if SmartThings Now is disabled you don’t see the offline notifications etc so perhaps it is best to leave it on. It may be that SmartThings Now is a place for notifications from elsewhere rather than having any notification generating capability of its own.
All notifications in SmartThings Now can be dismissed and you won’t see them again (or if you will it takes a while as I haven’t seen them since yesterday). Again that includes the offline notifications etc. There remains a Features suggestions in the app settings which I suspect was turned back on by the app when it was updated and hopefully disabling that might quieten the plugs for the service apps.
Offline diagnostics can still be found on the Menu tab but it has gained the extra functionality of the old tile which allowed it to ignore devices that are expected to be offline, and the notification that it creates also has a shortcut to this. Routine insights can be found under Discover on the Routines tab. I’ve had it throw up an introductory notification in the SmartThings Now space. I haven’t looked further into that.
The other tiles like Media output, Broadcast, and Sleep environment report are Features under Favourites (if your account has suitable permissions). The Sleep environment report remains very picky about which temperature and humidity sensors it will work with and so the Bedroom is not considered a place where I might be sleeping.
I have yet to encounter any specific mention of low battery warnings anywhere and I can’t comment about appliances. I am rather expecting them all to use the SmartThings Now space.
The vague, once seen or ignored and never repeated, introductory blurb rather implies that we are supposed to be excited by being able to press the icons on tiles to run actions. We always could when they were smaller, except then the text seemed bigger, was certainly easier to read, and it was less frequently truncated so we didn’t have to guess what the tile was. It’s not as if the icons are any more meaningful. People will still be inadvertently turning on their air quality sensor expecting the Christmas tree to light up however big and unnecessarily padded the icons are.
In light mode the wallpapers are all incredibly washed out and they seem to be particularly fond of diluted sick as a colour scheme. Everything is so pale that a bold font becomes painful to look at.
To be fair things look better in dark mode. However there isn’t a manual option for dark mode, it follows the system.
Why do they still not carry the wallpapers through into things like device details?
I haven’t investigated the wallpaper top left that is marked LIVE. I know it has an information button but it didn’t provide much enlightenment.
I have had to reassign every single one of my wallpapers as the app remembered which of the nine squares I had selected for each thing and the designs had changed. Why can’t we just choose the wallpaper assigned to each of the squares instead?
Sitting rearranging the device tiles in one of my rooms and wondering why a virtual switch was switched on. Then I realised. It had just been turned on when I was moving the tiles around. This hasn’t been a problem previously, but now the icons are much bigger and more central they are far easier to accidentally hit. Which is probably why they made the icons small and offset to start with.
Another unwanted update where users instantly see issues that developers seem unable - it’s just meant time spent going through settings trying to fix as much as possible.
Cosmetically it has buttons that are too small (expand adds functions not increases size) on unattractive wallpapers that are dark at normal brightness.
The app works full screen ignoring the camera and icons at the top and, depending on settings, navigation buttons at the bottom of the screen.
Without any small (phone) size screenshots it sounds like a seriously botched interface update so think I’ll wait a while!
Edit: Just installed on a secondary use tablet, absolute nightmare. Layout, truncations, unwanted views, bad menu handling… On my small screen I can only imagine it would make it all but unusable!
Wow, ok so looks like I’ll have to roll back this update. Not liking it completely, but some things are “ok”. Issue for me is that they broke my ability to use these devices so far:
Hub v4 (newest version). Tapping on the tile does nothing but blink. It works on my v2 and v3 hubs just fine. I force closed the app, and cleared cache, but still nothing on the v4. I can long press on the tile and use “edit”, but that’s useless if you want to access Preferences.
EnvisaLink Edge Driver (used for Honeywell/Ademco Vista panel system integration). Same issue as the hub v4 issue mentioned above. For me, this one is most important because Preferences is where all config info is managed. FYI @philh30 . Not sure if the DSC driver has this issue, so FYI @TAustin
I can still use the SmartThings Advanced web app to manage these, but definitely not ideal.
Also noticed that when viewing a Room I’ll see “loading…” pop up every so often.
I didn’t find a way to see the entire message, making it somewhat pointless displaying it, but it seems to be a Feature suggestion suggesting that if I turn on the Feature suggestions feature (currently off) I will able to see Feature suggestions.
I see that Routine activations now appear in the device history tabs. Sadly public Rules aren’t included but it is still a positive.
I still hope that one day they will revert to showing all activations of Routines, instead of just the ones where the conditions evaluate as true. As things stands it promotes the idea of the magical trigger fairy.
Hey @Andreas_Roedl , this app update also broke our ability to use your Edge driver for the SONOFF Hydro ONE valve. All we can do is open or close the valve because tapping on the tile won’t open any more.
