Wouldn’t surprise me a little bit. I lived through several acquisitions and it’s typical that the new owners want everyone to believe that it’s “business as usual”… for the first six month or so… before the “realignment” begins. Either that or all the staffers were sent off on a mandatory holiday break and were forbidden from using the Internet. 
Sorry for being this naive. Then why would they even bother buying them?
Acquisitions can be driven by several goals:
- Acquiring market share or a customer base (e.g. buying a competitor). That’s clearly not the case here.
- Acquiring new technology that’s costly or time consuming to develop internally. That’s a possibility, although a big question is how does the company plan to integrate this technology into the existing product line.
- Acquiring talent (acquihire). That’s what seems to happen to Revolv. Another possibility here too.
Then again, searching for a reason in the corporate hallways may be a futile task. Why did Google buy Motorola?
Anyway, I find it curious that Samsung didn’t even bother to slap their logo onto SmartThings products, as if they don’t want anything to do with it. Sometimes companies prefer to keep established brand name, but I don’t think SmartThings qualifies as an established household brand. Of course, NestLabs also continues to operate under it’s old name, but again comparing SmartThing to Nest would probably be an insult (to Nest) 
One word… Patents!
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They turned out to be worthless, AFAIK.
Possibly… But at the time, they wanted as much leverage as possible in the smart phone legal battlefield with the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft. While things ‘seem’ to be quieting down on that front, whose to say that would have been the case had Google not acquired Moto, and Microsoft Nokia.
This is a pretty depressing thread. I’ve only been messing around with ST since about August but I have also shared many of the problems that you all have mentioned. The unreliability of the android app has been driving me insane. Even worse in my mind is the IDE though. It is so incredibly slow that writing and testing even the simplest apps is nearly impossible for me. On top of that the simulator essentially does not work at all and I have tried it in multiple browsers.
I feel like the only way to get ST to do some of the coolest stuff that you might want to do is to write your own code and the fact that you can do that with ST is a strength. Sadly though even some basic things require users to write their own apps which just isn’t realistic. I’ve seen several threads with people complaining about the fact that the only way to get some basic function to work is to write their own app. As HA becomes more mainstream the new adopters aren’t going to be people who can write their own smartapps and will expect it to just work. If ST can’t get to that point soon I’m not sure it can succeed.
I do hope what your suggesting about Samsung isn’t true but I wouldn’t be surprised either. Samsung’s #1 competitor is Apple who will be coming with Homekit soon. I think Samsung bought ST as a way to compete with Apple by getting their hand into the HA business. Likely more for the intellectual property than the actual hardware which is why I wouldn’t be surprised to see them kill ST altogether.
Be as it may, my point is that there’s way too many hi-tech acquisitions that “seemed like a good idea” when they were made but turned out to be a dud. The only notable development since the SmartThings acquisition (other than botched “infrastructure upgrade”) was releasing Windows smartphone app. Windows? Really? Who cares?! Look at the corporate news feed. There’s nothing there since February!
Nevertheless, I think Google is happy with what they came away with in their acquisition.
As for smartthings, the only improvement i have seen in 6 months is a bug fix or two in what is still an unusable app.
I see their commercial advertisements in a number of podcasts where the focused buzz words are ‘easy’, ‘Hue’, 'Nest, and ‘Sonos’ and I just cringe.
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Hardly. Apple’s approach to smart home is entirely different (and smart). They’re not going to bother with making gadgets that require a lot of end-user hand-holding to install and configure and leave this dirty business to MFi partners. Apple just creates the means for all the lowly gadgets to attach themselves to the “mothership”. Samsung has nothing of the kind and I don’t see SmartThings filling these shoes, regrettably.
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Wow, I am incredibly relieved to find this thread. Even though I’m pretty early into the purchasing process, I was pretty much sold on ST but now I’m not so sure. I’m completely brand new to the home automation scene and looking to outfit my new home in the next couple of months so it will be interesting to see if things really do improve. I really appreciate such candid opinions, especially about the app. 
You guys woke me up with your posts! 
I was so asleep with doctor prescribed sleep med. What bothers me the most right now is the absence of omni present @ben… @tyler and @duncan poor guys are holding on to the ripping thread (as it seems).
Look at the latest threads below trying to loose some weight, opening a garage door, replacing a three way switch… I sincerely hope they appear and answer these! A resurrection may be. Good night, guys!
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I totally agree with what your saying about Apple not bothering with the hardware side, but my point is I don’t really think Samsung is going to either which is why I said I think they bought it more for then intellectual side then the hardware side. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Samsung come out with something akin to Homekit very soon and I think ST is just a conduit to get started. Who knows though, I just don’t see any other compelling reason for them to have bought ST.
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I just read through every message on this trail begun by @iHavequestions. Brutal stuff, and it makes me feel terrible. But I really appreciate the direct and passionate feedback.
There is so much that I could say here, but perhaps better to just strike up a dialogue and answer specific questions. A few things to get started:
- I know it feels like we’ve been way too quiet on the roadmap, and I agree with you. It’s a function of the whirlwind we’ve been in since last Spring from funding to acquisition to ramp up planning. The silence will end starting next week at CES, and I do think you’ll be excited about what we are doing. I will make an effort to be as transparent as possible in the roadmap going forward.
- We are plowing forward with SmartThings in a huge way, so have no worries or misconceptions about us getting blended into Samsung as a talent acquisition or something like that. We have a very extensive roadmap and essentially unlimited investment capital that we are now pouring into all elements of the SmartThings experience and products.
- Things at the core platform level were unstable at a deeply unacceptable level to us throughout the summer and up until November when we performed the major platform architecture upgrade. At a cloud level, things have been much more stable since then. We felt every ounce of your pain and are in a better place now with some continuous improvements planned. We monitor all platform health metrics in real-time, with visibility across the entire company.
- Adding to the trouble along the way was the continued acceleration of activity on the platform. Every key metric has more than doubled since August. We’ve now got an architecture in place that we believe can handle the growth going forward.
- The biggest inherent problems we see tend to be with local integrations where the underlying device’s APIs are unstable. Wemo and Sonos have both been trouble. Sonos will get better soon when they release a formal API at last. I will look into Hue, but my Hue’s work well talking directly to my SmartThings Hub without the Hue bridge in the middle. Generally speaking, mesh networked devices on Zigbee or Z-wave work best today.
- Another source of frequent trouble is breakdown in basic network health in Z-wave device networks. They aren’t self-healing when a device stops responding properly, and we don’t handle the degradation smoothly. The manifestation of this is often seen as hiccups or delays in switches turning on or off or the like when a command gets stuck waiting for a response from a given device. A manually initiated Z-wave network repair (from the mobile app or web interface) often helps a lot. In the next six months I expect we will add much better utilities to flag when these problems are happening and even initiate network repairs automatically in the background. We are also working on next gen networking technologies that will be inherently better (e.g. Zigbee -> Thread, etc.).
- Another inherent challenge has been our cloud-centric architecture to-date. While it is super powerful and flexible, it causes latency and hiccups at times if there is any degradation of the connection and so many steps are needed for basic actions (e.g. door open event goes to cloud, subscribed SmartApp fires, sends command to turn on light down to hub which relays it to light switch, which then sends ack back to hub and through to cloud). We will make a big announcement next week directly related to this, and are moving to a hybrid architecture that will address it soon while retaining all the power and flexibility.
- I will personally look into the issues cited with the IDE and was not aware there. We have hired a direct report to me to lead the development of all of our developer tools (vs. a partial focus area for our product management team) who starts in January, so direct visibility on all issues related to the IDE will be clearer going forwards.
- None of the above are excuses for usability challenges in our mobile apps, from speed of loading which goes down as you add lots of locations and devices, to general ease of use. We’re proud of what we’ve done and lots of people love it, but we see many ways it could be much better and are exploring a range of options from a number of incremental improvements to a full UX overhaul. I and we would love to hear from you directly about what improvements would help you the most.
- Another challenge has been organizational as we’ve grown from a team of 7 founders to 50 to 100 and now growing even more rapidly. We are organizing ourselves to take advantage of our greater scale now so that each of the most important focus areas has a fully dedicated team versus task switching that happens constantly in a smaller org. This structural change will result in a better, more consistent and predictable flow of product improvements in the areas that matter most to you.
I hope the above points are helpful. Above all else, know that we are listening, care tremendously, and are committed to making both incremental as well as break through improvements along the journey together with you. Great things take time, but I’m confident we will get there. Thank you for all your patience and support and passion along the way!
-Alex
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Thank you Alex,
The Hue Bridge is rock solid, and so is the API, but the SmartThings integration only implements a small part of it (no groups, effects, transition times).
I think like many others have said, the silence was the most worrisome part so this is great to hear. I appreciate the lengthy response and I can’t wait to see what you guys announce at CES.
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Alex, thanks for all of the insight and information!!
My biggest recurring headache is my Z-wave network, which is fairly large and spread out (75 Z-wave devices). Some of the latencies are horrible, while some are great. We could really use some diagnostic / repair tools. I use repeaters but it’s impossible to tell how effective they are. The question arises about using a second hub, but that’s not supported. Maybe next month…
@alex, thank you for your lengthy reply and the time I know you had to take to read through all this. I certainly appreciate the openness, and look forward to what’s ahead.
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I have fully given up on ST. I have switched to Fibaro. A bit more expensive but much more stable platform with loads of options. Works well with other Z-Wave devices and has some very cool in-house devices (smoke detector, presence/brightness/temperature device, dimmers, switches…). I’m more than happy and I have NEVER had an outage of the hub (using the home center lite!). So, as much as I tip my hat to Alex for writing a long response, it’s too little too late. nevertheless I’m curious what’s up at CES but the ST ship has sailed for me.
Yeah… this stuff looks very sexy; nice to hear it works well. Is there an open API? And can it talk to other (RESTful, etc.) gear’s APIs?