I was wondering how come ST doesn’t have a official iPad app ? They have one for android and iPhone but not the iPad, it’s hard believe that a company as big as ST or (Samsung) doesn’t have a official iPad app.
2 Likes
Yah… it’s been hard to believe that … even 2 years ago. But being here for 3 years, it was even worse when there was no Android App! The whole product was unusable even by Kickstarter Backers (I am one of them!) unless you had iOS.
Ironically, I was able to get started back then because we have a iPad in the house (no iPhones! – just Android and Windows Phone).
Subsequently, SmartThings just has to prioritize, and they know that the current official mobile App is still criticized for not having optimal usability (… it has gotten a lot better; except for still too many of those “red-bar” error messages), so I think they rather fix the existing phone App than divert resources to tablet size stuff.
(Discrete plug; Please give SmartTiles a try… runs in any browser, so it is a popular choice for tablet and iPad users for over a year.)
1 Like
I use Smart Tiles and am all in all happy. My only problem is the ordering of devices. On my iMac it is perfect, on my iPad and iPhone it is not in the same order as the way I like it on the iMac. But I guess to have different order for each device I would need five different instances running, which I am not sure if it is even possible, Or again I might just not be doing something correctly. I am a perfectionist, but a tinkerer, so I have been playing with CSS to make it what I want, but ordering has been my only real problem. If someone has an idea let me know, it would be appreciated.
How about minimal usability? As in, I can’t use it at all since the last update. 
There’s definitely no “better” on this trajectory for me, unfortunately.
Oh gawd… I was afraid that might happen; very sorry to hear that – can you revert and still use the older version of the App?
Dunno what to say. There are so many very valid complaints about nearly every facet of the product, and the official SmartThings App is undeniably weak, regardless of the attempts to improve it. The use of a hamburger menu seems unnecessary … the flow to the “installed SmartApps” page, and such, wasn’t that bad.
I believe SmartThing does (did!?) feedback sessions for major App overhauls, and bet there was one (under NDA) for this new version.
The disregard for ADA / accessibility is really bad; I suppose it really doesn’t matter if it was just an oversight, or if it was a prioritization choice… either indicates a problem with competence and/or leadership foresight.
The order should definitely remain the same (unless over the past few days SmartThings has temporarily been losing “state” information for some SmartApps and then it comes back … sometimes).
But the order of tiles is Left to Right, wrapping Top to Bottom. That means if you have a wider vs. narrower screen (or just switch from portrait to landscape), the overall layout will appear to change. Let me know if you observe this to not be true.
So; yes… as you mention, the best currently available solution is to use a distinct child Dashboard (5 are available per Account Location) for different screen (browser window) sizes and portrait vs. landscape if necessary. In the future, we hope to offer the ability to create more dashboards, so using them for layout won’t be a “waste”; we’re also adding some small amount of extra layout control which could help a bit in some sizing situations.
(I don’t know if tablet browsers have a zoom/scale option; I also thought we had a way to change the base tile size with a parameter in the URL, but can’t find it anymore; that could help keep things aligned if you use larger or smaller tiles depending on the browser window canvas size…).
I’m flabbergasted at the state of the mobile apps after 3 years. I have about a hundred apps on my phone… 3 of them don’t support landscape orientation, including SmartThings and my credit union.
Remember all the wasted real estate in the v1 app? Remember how Ben told us it was a placeholder for exciting things to come? They never came.
The Android app is currently over 110MB. Seriously? It is larger than Chrome! It is almost twice the size of Riptide GP2, three times the size of Hue. Only Google Maps, Sheets, Slides, and Webview are larger. What does this app do that it requires over a hundred Meg of code and resources?
This, coupled with the back end problems they are unable to solve (or even identify), has me worried that the people they have are not very good at what they do.
1 Like
Yes that is exactly what is happening as I have four different size screens.
1 Like