I don’t think, from my own experience and reading on the old forum post, that on the legacy platform switching to another dth published stock would make many more uncertified devices work fine.
The legacy platform had the ability to fend for ourselves only if:
- You know how to program something in groovy. (10% 15% of the cases ?)
- You know how to use custom codes made and shared by other developers, altruistically or working for manufacturers or by other users. (40%…60% of the cases?)
- You were lucky that your device worked directly with a DTH’s stock or published in smartthings. 20%… 30% of the cases??
Almost like now with the generic pairings!. Although the solution is different now, but I don’t think it’s much more difficult.
Using too many generic pairing criteria would easily make the device pair directly with the driver you don’t want and hardly with the profile it would need.
When you later change it to another driver, its clusters and attributes are no longer configured again, an incomprehensible decision for my part of smartthing, which did not apply to groovy and which I reported 2 years ago, although it is true that there are devices that only accept the configuration when they are in pairing mode.
Therefore, for drivers that are used for so many different types of devices, generic pairing may not work and create other device performance problems.
Each DTH only had one profile and was used for almost identical devices.
Now also all the stock driver codes are published, many of the custom driver codes are also published, some are not.
For most standard devices with adding fingerprints, copying and pasting 5 lines is enough.
In others you need to add the fingerprints also in a subdriver, which usually have manufacturer names or self-explanatory functions, such as battery, temperature, motion-timeout, …
The same happened with many DTH’s, you had to modify the published code to adapt it to your device, for example almost all multicomponent devices, each manufacturer follows a different way of assigning endpoints, some are followed ascending, others followed but descending, other pairs, other odd, …
I think, that being self-sufficient in this for many users was and is a utopia
As a general reflection for those who want to read it
I don’t think the perceived dissatisfaction problem is just of smartthings:
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The manufacturers: who deliberately partially break the standards so that their device is not easily compatible and force you to use their platform.
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The platforms: like smartthings, the invoice for certifying and/or developing device integrations so that they work on their platform, it is part of their business and they invest a lot of money in making it attractive to potential customers, another thing is that we like how and what what it does or not
However, smartthings offers us for free all the tools and all the code of its drivers and libraries that make its platform work, free web space to host and share our custom drivers and access to its APIs, so that we use the information from our devices almost as we want. Others platform offer more and many others less or nothing.
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The users: What about the users? … we want to buy the device that we want, knowing that it will not work with my in use platform or buy the cheapest or the most expensive or the one that we like the most, but we want it to work wherever and however I want and we are not aware that sometimes this requires many hours of work that someone else will have to do to satisfy our wishes and we are very demanding with those who are not to blame.
That is why all open source platforms have their forums and developers, some altruistic and others working for manufacturers to avoid certification and be able to adapt the devices to the platform.
Matter will fix it, hopefully!, but I doubt it
And very important, it is appreciated that smartthings makes people as attentive and valid as @nayelyz or @AlejandroPadilla available to all of us to address our doubts, problems and requests. Thank you very much to both of you and others who went through these tasks before.
Personally, I think that smartthings team normally pays little attention and in a rather distant and arrogant way to the suggestions, complaints, possible solutions that are made to them from the forum, some as I have told before I have done myself, and normally I have not received even the slightest no answer or explanation
I also understand that their work, concerns and ultimate goals are not ours.
