Well I’m glad you’re having a good experience. The rest of us want to bitch slap ST. Keep your head up, I guess. Just don’t come crying to us when your system hits the fan some day 
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Wrong…
The rest of us do not want to slap it. Some do, some don’t.
My setup is simple and straightforward, a bit like me before you say it 
, and it works brilliantly.
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Exactly I don’t need 100 core pistons or all that. I have quite amount of motion activated lights and work fine. Sometimes there is a delay but is to be expected. I didn’t by it for an alarm but it has not given me a false one and haven’t had a real one yet. So because I don’t want it to make my breakfast I am not in the crowd that wants to slap it either.
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Of what, a POS system. There should be no delay. I’m sick of it.
Right perfection is your only acceptable solution. What tech as seen that. Windows lmao. Mac just as bad. Smartphone nope. So why do you hold ST to such a high standard?
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And if your sick of it move on damn!!
This is the ST is over party. Don’t bring the party down.
What we want is far from perfection. I get you super simple setup just works for you, mine isn’t simple. I am using ST as it is meant to be used, I do expect it to be reliable and respond at a reasonable speed. For example, the ST app. Super slow. If I need to do anything quick, I can’t depend on the app.
Before you tell us, we know your app is lightning fast. Mine isn’t.
Super simple I have over 120 devices. 8 locks 50 switches about 15 water sensors about 10 osram lighted outside. Countless motion sensors and contact sensors on every door and window. Along with the sheds in the back. Simple it is not. But it’s done what it was described to do. Anything above that is cake. Sorry to dampen Smartthings party is over but it is far from over.
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The moment you choose ST, you should expect response may delay, since it’s running on cloud. It could be your own z-wave mash delay, router delay, internet delay etc
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Exactly. It’s wireless and subject to interference and lag.
Especially ZigBee as it’s 2.4 you know how crowded that space is? Zwave not so much as 900 isn’t as crowded as once was. Cordless phones anyone lol
lol @ telling folks what to do…
I don’t believe that the majority of people are unhappy with ST. It’s far from perfect but I’m pretty happy with the setup I have. After a year, now 208 devices and building. Great community.
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There’s no real way to tell. They don’t publish sales numbers although they have mentioned some at some conferences, and it’s at least 150,000 users. Less than one third of those have even registered for this forum.
Although it’s not a perfect measurement, you can always look at Amazon reviews. It’s probably not a coincidence that all of the following:
SmartThings, wink, vera plus, and Insteon
Have about the same rating of 3.5.
Nor is it likely a coincidence that all of the following consistently have a higher rating than that first group, somewhere between four and five.
Lutron Caseta, Philips Hue, Amazon Echo, Nest
The second group are systems with limited feature sets that really focus on the user experience and it pays off in higher ratings.
So SmartThings doesn’t look like it’s an outlier compared to its price niche competitors. Full-featured Home automation at very low cost is just a tough target to hit. 
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Me not telling anyone what to do. Saying what tech is perfect?
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Cmon, you know better than that. ST has made it ‘possible’ to solve the problem. You still have to throw your own ingenuity at certain aspects of it, such as finding a way to shift your home network over to a cellular data network if your power goes out. (Which, btw, routers are pretty good at doing if you get the right one.)
The hundred-dollar SmartThings box, in and of itself, cannot solve most problems. It is slightly outside the ST scope to fix a widespread utility outage. 
As for the original thread premise: it’s silly. This party is just getting started. ST is better than a lot of things out there, and is but an early system approach in what will eventually mature into what we all grew up seeing on The Jetsons, in 2001: A Space Oddysey, in StarTrek, etc. Frankly, despite the occasional issues it is exciting to be involved in this process.
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Ill add to this, smartthings sucks a lot of the time, but the issue is zwave/zigbee. The standards suck, so all implementation will suck. Some aspects are cool, and as it develops, st will get better but you have to understand samsung relies on a protocol that just plain is never going to be reliable, no matter what you do. Personally I think they have done a wonderful job so far with what they have to work with. Yes, local processing on everything would make things much more reliable, yes Ill never ever EVER use scout because of the lack of entry delays, but my point is, don’t blame samsung for a bad experience when zigbee/zwave on any platform would be just as bad if not worse thanks to lack of openness on other platforms. /my 2c
This is only partially true. ST’s cloud sucks most of the time, independently of zigbee / z-wave. I have some devices integrated with ST that do not use z/z, and they are as prone to delays and missed events as the z/z stuff. That’s all in the cloud. The ST cloud is like variable thickness molasses. Sometimes it’s quick, sometimes it takes many seconds to roundtrip an event. Add on top of that the fact that they have broken zigbee in some ways (all of the motion sensor problems that people report) and that mesh networks are inherently inferior (as compared to fixed repeater networks), and you get this mess.
I would have to respectfully disagree. My background is network engineering. I chose SmartThings initially specifically because it was using two well-established reliable standards, Z wave and zigbee. As long as you take the cloud out of the picture, there are many implementations with these protocols that are rocksolid.
At the low-end in home automation, indigo runs only Z wave devices and is extremely stable. At the very high-end in home automation, control 4 runs zigbee, and no one would pay their prices (typically 10% of the cost of the house plus an ongoing annual fee) for an unreliable system.
Zigbee is used for monitoring systems in hospitals, for most smart meters, for cable settop boxes, for the Phillips hue lighting system. These are all low maintenance, mostly set and forget systems.
Z wave works particularly well for light switches, and the Leviton line with their own simple controller is extremely reliable.
The standards are not the problem. If you buy very cheap offbrand devices you can run into issues, but that’s true of any electrical device.
Other than that, the reliability issues come from the cloud and trying to operate a multiprotocol platform with a $99 hub.
There are a number of alternatives to SmartThings. Most are much less versatile and flexible than SmartThings, and several work with only one protocol. But stability is not the issue for most of those competitors that are not cloud-based. Missing features are typically what bring people to SmartThings.
Every system has pluses and minuses, but the standards are not to blame for SmartThings’ stability issues.
Submitted with respect.
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