SmartThings - It's garbage, isn't it?

General Discussion
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I’ve been using SmartThings for a number of years now, suffered through the terrible Classic app that couldn’t get worse, until we saw the “new” app. It took something like 2 years before that became even remotely usable and I’ve been “herding” devices and automations ever since.

Recently all cloud automations have become unpredictable, unreliable and my automations may as well not exist. I thought I had the minimal set of off-site devices - deliberately selected local device handlers over cloud ones - and tried to minimise the amount of reliance on the Samsung infrastructure, but it’s now (over the last few months) so randomly broken (with zero error reporting) as to be a joke.

Before the fanbois jump, my 'net connection is highly reliable, connectivity to elsewhere very good and whenever I manually connect to graph.*blah it’s OK on the web level. The backend, behiond the scenes though. Meh.

Who can sell me the benefits on a US-centric Hubitat gateway? The lack of requirement for external dependencies appeals…

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You may want to ask this question over in the Hubitat Community…:wink:

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Did you ever make the switch? About to through my SmartThings hub down the garbage disposer.

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Yes, never looked back. Hubitat C7 for control and apps and I decided to pull all my luminaries (bulbs, to most of us) on the Hue hub for the benefits of their apps, (with all switches, motion detectors and apps on the Hubitat, as I said). Works great. Samsung has never been used since.

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A word of caution, for people wanting to switch to Hubitat.

A couple of weeks back, I switched all my devices over to Hubitat. It took me a day to move everything over. The move to Hubitat was a very easy and smooth process. Everything was fine for about 2 whole days and then things went downhill. On the third day, for some strange reason, the Z-wave network started having issues with some of my older z-wave devices that were purchased along with the SmartThings Hub back in 2014.

I’ve read on the Hubitat forum that some devices don’t work well on the C-7 Hub. You could have ghost nodes and devices that are spamming the mesh, and have devices that don’t play well with the rest of the devices. I tried all recommended solutions, but nothing helped.

In the meantime I had disconnected the SmartThings hub. I decided to go back and realized that I had lost the welcome code, which I had to request from support. Now, I’m back on SmartThings with basically a clean install and things are stable, for now. My automations are working fine as well. I still rely on ActionTiles for accurate device status.

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Yes, absolute garbage. I’ve been a user for many years now, and the experience has not improved for me since day 1. I saw the potential and hoped they would work out the kinks, but the best I’ve ever achieved with it is “laggy, unreliable trash.”

I’ve made the switch to Home Assistant, no thanks to SmartThings during that process either. Device removal did Z-Wave exclusion on about 2 of my 30+ devices—removing them from the app meant I had to add and remove them again to get them excluded. Doing it from the Hub exclusion mode would exclude them, but then leave the device in the graph API. Like wtf, how does your system not even talk to itself correctly? Why does the app always need to reload for 17+ seconds, just to tell me my light switch needs to “download a driver”? How fcking complicated did you guys make this such that it works so poorly?

Home Assistant is a fast, capable, breath of fresh air of a replacement. Local execution feels much better, and works without internet. Alexa is working far better than SmartThings, and I’m not even paying for the integration. Since ST can’t seem to fix any of the 5+ year old issues, I would drop them like a bad habit.

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99% of my ST set up is local now. But I am intrigued by Home assistant and will likely switch when my ST hub dies.

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But 100%of the SmartThings app requires the cloud. :thinking: so do you just not use the app for control or status information?

Here’s the official schema for the new architecture:

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Yeah I’ve worked within its limitations.
So I’ve disabled smart home monitor ( or whatever it’s called these days ) as that’s not local

So just use modes now. Because routines have been upped to 1000 I’ve just created lots of them with notifications to my phone when I’m in away mode if any windows or doors etc have been opened. I know these rely on the cloud for notifications and that’s fine. I have lots of local automations whilst on away mode to run certain things when we are out , for security.

Because my away mode to home mode relies on our phone’s presence ( can’t get away from not doing this unfortunately), then if for whatever reason the internet’s down when we arrive and essentially ‘stuck’ in away mode then I have a ST button hidden nearby within my front door to switch on a virtual switch ( this stops the mode from changing back to away mode automatically) then. 2 seconds later, change mode to home , adjust my lights accordingly, turn off dogs barking from Alexa (thanks to a local virtual switch), and if the internet is down I can easily get to my Alexa device to turn her down to zero. This routine is completely local so will always work regardless of internet being down. ( I’ve yet to use this failsafe because my phones presence has been reliable so far to change modes )

Then at night my night modes are all local too as these don’t rely on our phones presence.

All my lighting throughout my whole house is 100% local.

All my security automatons for any mode, home, night and away are all 100% local apart from the obvious ones like Arlo cameras but I have this covered by setting up some motion sensors outside each entry point to do things depending on which mode I’m in. again, all 100% local.

I’ve really thought this through and like I said, I’ve worked with some of the drawbacks as best I could and most of all my ST automations and the like are all local.

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I thought it was - until I made the switch to Hubitat and found out the hard way that SmartThings is really not bad at all!! I am in the process of picking up the bits and pieces to try home assistant just to be sure there isn’t something better out there, but Hubitat is a freaking hot mess. Like scary bad.

I started with ST back before Samsung bought it, when it was still pretty much beta, and I remember the good old days of getting pretty much anything to work on SmartThings and how things kind of went down hill a bit with Samsung swooping in and trying to kill off the DIY part of it all. But here’s the thing… - I still have an old ThingShield running my alarm panel and it works pretty much 99% of the time. That’s not bad considering it won’t work at all on Hubitat and there isn’t any red flags in the code suggesting it shouldn’t. But nothing works on Hubitat, so there is that.

The real reason I made the switch is that I am tired of poltergeist lights and was afraid ST would finally put a nail in the coffin of my alarm panel, but even with a couple of phantom lights, which is turning out to be some bad dimmer devices more than the hub I think, at least it works some times!

Hubitat works maybe 5% of the time? And that feels generous… I have rebooted, power cycled, reset, re-included until I am blue in the face and the dang thing still leaves me standing in the dark most of the time! I have moved it away from not just any RF transmitters, like my Wi-Fi and ST hub (which my ST hub actually has been parked on top of my Wi-Fi hub and STILL works just fine) - but ALL electronics within reason and it doesn’t do squat to help… Over on the Hubitat forum they trade tips like “hack your hub and add external antennas” or “make sure you don’t have any hops between devices” “make a routine to power cycle overnight” and other such nonsense… I work in RF electronics for a living, and when I hear that level of claptrap, it tells me is that their RF hardware in the C7 hub is garbage, or the firmware is, or both… How come SmartThings radios have zero issue talking to anything and everything, hops, jumps and flying leaps included, all with tiny little patch antennas itself and has nary a hiccup in comparison? Zwave and Zigbee both were designed from the ground up as mesh network protocols, but now all of a sudden mesh is bad and causing all the problems? Malarkey!

I thought well heck, local processing has to be better and faster - it’s not… Most devices have a bit of handshaking and reporting to do on their own sweet time, so even if your hub was faster, it’s still going to be waiting on all your devices, so that’s a total wash. I haven’t found Hubitat to be any faster, in fact, with as buggy as it has been, it’s probably slower to be honest.

I mean they preach about the cloud being evil and vacuuming up all your data, yet they offer a cloud connection for a fee…? Come on, man…. At least the ST cloud works! And if Samsung wants to know how often my hallway lights are on, whatever their kink is, fine by me.

The unintuitive UI is bad. Like just so-so bad. I feel like it’s their take on the ST groovy IDE, but I have to use it as the actual UI for the entirety of the Hubitat experience and that is just a complete drag. Give me simple and pretty. I don’t need to feel like I’m actually programming my house every day to feel like a competent person.

My gut feeling is that they are just putting in enough effort to keep the lights on (at their office, because it ain’t working at my house) and waiting for a sweet big money deal like happened to ST. Like someone will buy them up just to put it out of their misery. The YouTube video of who I am assuming is their CEO in his office with his wall of golf balls tells the tale… He even says he “couldn’t program himself out of a wet paper bag” - in other words, they paid some firm in China or India to design their hardware, hoping a community like the old school ST folks will come along and make it all work, and then sell it all for a nice pay check. That’s all just my own conspiracy theory and I got no evidence, but it looks sketchy to me…

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I can’t speak to the rest of it, but several of the early Hubitat founders were well-known community developers here, and could definitely program. They had spent several years building smartapps for themselves and sharing them with the community before they decided they wanted something primarily local. So no conspiracies there.

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Why does a CEO have to know how to write computer code? That sounds more like a job requirement for a developer. They have a few of those too, as @JDRoberts explained.

Now you’re thinking like a CEO. Maybe you can get in on that sweet action before their big payday.

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There’s a niche for every skillset. Hope you find yours.

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The only thing worse than a troll is an incompetent troll

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Yeah, got to say, I made the jump and do not recognise these comments at all. Hubitat has been rock solid for me, zero complaints.

As for ‘the cloud’ element you mention you don’t have to pay a sub, many users just access their devices using a VPN for free. Or, if you mostly use Webcore, well, nothing changes the dashboard can be accessed from anywhere.

However, with the full sub you get automatic cloud (local backups are always free), settings, rules, apps and Z-Wave network backups plus free hub replacements if anything goes wrong for less than $50/year. Or if you just want remote admin it’s $19.99/year. Hugely worth it if you ask me.

Plus, most importantly you’re supporting the ex-ST Devs to keep this platform alive where so many others have failed.

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did you put HA on mini PC or Raspberry PI?
Didn’t you consider using HA and ST in paralel? (ST mostly as Zigbee and Zwave hub and HA as a smart home hub?
I am planning to switch to HA just don’t decide the way yet.

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Using ST at all would account for about 98% of my annoyance with Z-Wave and home automation in general. I thought I had made a mistake going with Z-Wave when I invested in devices, as it’s always been horrifically slow and only 80% reliable at best, but it turns out that was all due to SmartThings. My 6+ year-old Z-Wave devices are all instantaneous (as well as synchronized) now that it’s on local execution. I would never consider doing a cloud-based hub again after having this much initial success.

I had started with a Pine64 A64+. That just felt too slow for me and I knew that’s where it wasn’t going to end up, so I migrated to a Core i5 that I’ve been mostly using for a NAS, and did so with a docker-compose setup running on Ubuntu 22.04. I have zwave.js running in parallel with that setup, as well as a couple of bespoke services I built to scrape my Solar production and home consumption. It’s not quite as easy as running Home Assistant supervised might be, but I absolutely love how I can feel safe knowing that my docker volumes are all I need to port my working installation over to another machine or deployment method. I don’t at all have the anxiety I would have expected from completely upending my entire automation setup, and I have far more capability than I ever had with SmartThings. I’ve even gotten the Alexa integration working for free–the guides are a bit convoluted, but it works quite well when you work through it. If you don’t want to go through the hassle, $5 will allegedly solve your problems.

There was always a question for me on SmartThings as to what system should own which part of the process, since it was incapable of doing some of the things I needed out of the box. I was in this weird limbo where I had SmartThings doing one thing, IFTTT doing another, the 3rd-party device app doing another, HomeBridge/Apple Home doing the presence detection automations, etc. etc. etc. With Home Assistant, this is no longer a question. It’s been such a breath of fresh air, although you do still have the option of letting other solutions do automations if you wish. I just have a pretty strict rule at this point about keeping things in one place whenever possible.

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I’m surprised you had problems with Hubitat. I moved 80 devices and 40 Webcore pistons to Hubitat last fall and everything has been humming along nicely. A few months ago, I had issues with presence for a couple of days but that sorted itself out. As a matter of fact, things work so well I kind of miss having to get in there and tinker. I wonder why our experiences have been so wildly different.

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This is reality of home automation in this current moment. Two people could have exactly the same equipment and yet have very different experiences with reliability and functionality.

I always believe people when they say something works, and I always believe them when they say it doesn’t. It’s just that kind of world right now. :thinking:

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Simply being a troll. He was doing it on the hubitat board as well.

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