I was thinking more along the lines of a plugin replacement for ST backend but using the existing hub. This of course may not be possible…
Homey has been looking very attractive to me, when it comes across the pond. I’m about fed up with Samsung.
Google has proven time and again, they suck at hardware. I love my Alexa, but Amazon’s software track record is terrible.
Samsung is just another globo-corp that treats its customers as if we’re a nuisance.
There are solutions available now. The question is just how much you are willing to pay for them.
If we take the three big factors as reliability, rule complexity, and low-cost, Then right now, off-the-shelf, you can have two out of three.
You want reliability and low-cost? Done. Those exist. But you won’t get stacked conditionals.
You want reliability and rule complexity? Again, those exist – – but at a cost 10 times that of SmartThings.
You want rule complexity and low-cost, then you get SmartThings. And an MFOP of two weeks.
But nobody is going to “make a fortune” delivering all three of those because the low-cost piece gets eaten up by the rule complexity and reliability pieces. There’s just no way to make a profit.
There’s no business opportunity lying unexplored here. That’s why nobody wanted to buy Wink. Twice. 
And that includes Amazon and target and Home Depot and ADT and every other big player looking at this space.
Simple and low-cost, you can have. Complex and reliable, you can have. But complex, reliable, and low-cost can’t be delivered at a profit. And doesn’t fit the Apple model, because they make their profits by not being low cost.
The Hue bridge fits the Apple model for IOT. $60 for a lightbulb! It’s insane. But people love it and it sells well because it works well and it makes a mass market product out of what was a specialty customization before.
But SmartThings started out at the other end of the cost spectrum. Without any patents or anything to justify that other than sheer will to bring the product to market.
It paid off for the founders: Samsung bought them. But nothing solves the basic issue which is their intrinsic business model requires being driven by something other than profit. So it’s not an easy problem to solve. For anyone.
JMO
I have spent hours and I agree. The one that I am leaning towards is home assistant. But… like you said then we lose the people who aren’t technically inclined to invoke. My eyes what needs to be done is a standard needs to be created. Everyone is all over the damn place. Oh yeah don’t get me started on apple debacle. 
I forgot to mention Bluetooth in my previous posts thanks for pointing that huge one out! if I had tree to pick money from I would get it all done for you all.
I know you can’t please everyone I get that. But at least try and make road maps & inform us of progress.
Oh and Samsung if you aren’t doing it because it’s not cash flowing enough for you, oh there are ways you can make it sprout trees of money and at the same time keep it somewhat free if not totally free!
Well this is why I think it’s a good fit for amazon. Many people already have a prime subscription. Would you pay $15/mo more for reliable HA via a zwave/zigbee enable echo? I would. I’m not as down on the cloud processing as many are. I don’t see any huge technical limitation why it couldn’t work reliably. ST can’t do it, but someone can.
Sigh… maybe its time to just move to control4 and be done with it.
Got home today and lights didn’t turn on, had to manually unlock the door…welll…with a code and said WTF is CaCaCaaaaCold in here! Immediately thought WTH is going on with ST…As I am sitting here, my light just came on…
Amazon had the opportunity to buy Wink (twice) and passed.
They came out with echo plus, which has zigbee, but no Z wave. Because they wanted the set up to be super super simple, and at the present time Z wave just doesn’t allow for that.
Also remember that the Z wave alliance has said that 2/3 of zwave devices in the US are professionally installed. The big companies like Vivint and the home security companies like ADT install most zwave devices in the US. Not DIY folks like those in this forum
So absolutely, there are literally millions of people who will pay money every month for a stable reliable HA system. 
They’re already doing it through the contract providers. But that’s not the same market that smartthings has been selling to. And Amazon has made the decision that products like wink and presumably smartthings are too complex for the DIY market. At least too complex for the truly mass mass market that they want to sell to under their own brand.
I know that’s not going to resonate with most of the people reading this thread, but it’s just the market reality.
This can be done and exactly how I said people can run there own version do st cloud local or remote. It’s just some programming allowing us to set the app and hub to back up ip.
I say that within the next 5 years with the speed that all these other companies are racing at and creating a complete line of products for their own Eco systems and monthly, trying to top one another (Google / Amazon), I personally see a change in the overall architecture and how HA is driven and delivered. The one thing I agree with the race car drivers post is that their will be no hub, more of a centralized intelligence built within the framework of a home, tied in with all the electrical, creating a living, moving entity that grows, learns, heals itself, recovers etc… maybe it’s more like 15 years, but I do see things from Transcendence (great movie) becoming more of a reality and quicker to get here. Oh to be in my head.
For a $99 / $50 hub and no monthly cost, how in the world can you possibly think that you are going to have things working 100% of the time? I’m just being realistic. To put something super critical into the infrastructure (pump as tricky Bobby stated) and solely rely on that functionality when you go out of town for a month and have no backup plan in place (Neighbor checking pump, cameras monitoring pump, yada yada. For $50, it’s a hobby folks and fun to automate things and impress family and friends and Alexa listening to your every beck and call, but to expect a $99 / $50 hub to save the world and work 10 out of 10 times, not going to happen. Yes, Home Automation has been around for 30 years or so, but it still has a long way to go as far as a mid-range cost goes from a middle class pricing standpoint, so unless you are willing to shell out major dollars for a system as JD stated that has redundancy built in, runs locally and has fail points covered from as many angles as possible so that it remains running, you are going to pay for it. I understand that we all have many $1000s of dollars invested in all of our devices, software / SmartApps, additional costs, but guys and girls, it’s a $99 / $50 hub, that’s it. You aren’t going to get it for a $500 hub, not today anyway. If your home relies on ST or any other HA system to be available and working 100% without any backup plans, it’s going to be a long and painful road ahead.
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Well look, I got into ST hoping that it was their goal was to grow out of a hobby platform into legit HA. Perhaps at some point offering a premium paid service with SLAs, or a premium device with local processing and a subscription, or some combination of the above. Something, anything! I want them to have a viable business! I’m willing to pay! I just want it to effing work!
2 years on now and they clearly have no plans in that direction. They have no plans in ANY direction as far as I can tell.
It’s not that I expected to get perfect performance for a $99 one time fee, I expected them to have a plan to grow the damn platform into something robust and reliable, while hopefully making some money for themselves. This event is pretty much the last straw however. It’s crystal clear that Samsung has no plan at all for this platform and no use for the community around it.
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@WB70 good points. I only got into HA a little over a year ago. But since then I’ve learned most of the ins and outs, and starting to come to the conclusion that maybe cloud-based home automation isn’t the way to go. So perhaps my time with SmartThings has just been boot camp for setting up a local system. Z-wave and Zigbee will be around for a long while…
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Well, what are you waiting for? It’s just simple programming. You’re an engineer and an architect if I remember you touting that. Get started on it. What are you waiting for? No time to chime in, you have some simple work to get done 
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I thought Xfinity home only had a zigbee radio?
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Oh another thing allow us access to all the SmartThings groovy dth and smart apps!
I put together a dth for Honeywell thermostats and made it the way I think it should look, me being a partial designer I think it should be a standard how thermostats device types should start with why do we need to have such plain pages for our things. I’ll post pics from my iPad to show example.
Also Like I said I have had my iPad version of st running for a years and it might not be the best looking. I haven’t seen the new one but come on zoomed in app was just not a option. Now with voice assistants st app isn’t used much. Also please give us ability to add to the dashboard I am greatful that I still have more options than most people!
Wow, still not working, 15hours later…
Looks like smartthings is once again having an issue… It is constantly dropping zigbee devices, crazy long lag (over 2 minutes) for motion devices regardless of custom DTH. Home automation is more like home constipation! Unreal how much help this platform gets from the community (WebCoRE, Etc) and can STILL find a way to constantly fail us over and over again.
If amazon or google ever comes up with something similar, ill be more than happy to burn this garbage hardware and fire this incompetent HA non-solution! Samsung, you suck at HA and appliances - stick with phones.
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If I had access to the code I would but I’m a community member like you. 
My bad, i fixed the post.