SmartThings recent failures in stability and support

Has anyone recently experienced major issues with SmartThings? I am pretty reasonable and understand technology sometimes acts up, but in the past 3 weeks there has been nothing but issues after issues after issues, to the point where I don’t feel confident in recommending this system to anyone. I have had issues with routines, devices, activity logs, iOS app and now lack of support. Before Samsung took over I praised SmartThings high level of support and attention we received. Any emails submitted to support was acknowledged within 1-2 days, last email I sent to support took over a week for any response. Yesterday’s outage was even worst and today my system is basically FUBAR (F**ked Up Beyond Any Repair). I’m getting numerous errors, app is constantly crashing, devices are non-responsive, modes are not changing as they should, Smart Monitor is throwing massive alerts because I am unable to disarm and change the mode to home. I have emailed numerous times and even attempted the chat feature and of course it’s (zzzzzz crickets). I have rebooted the app, rebooted the hub, rebooted my phone and nothing is helping. Lights and motion detection in my home is going haywire. What happened to the once so great support and stability we were used to? And what happened to testing updates and patches before deploying? Any Change Management in place? Testing? QA? Before applying something that breaks the system. Again, this is a technology item and it’s not a life ending situation but the errors, messages, non-responsive devices is disrupting the force in our home environment. I’m hoping someone high up (VP, CEO, whomever) realizes the impact these issues are causing and the frustration we (speaking for myself of course) are having. I have invested hundreds, close to thousands of dollars into this system and it is now not working as intended. SmartThings support please help!!!

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We are discussing a fresh issue that is being perceived by multiple users on a different thread.

I’m also experiencing major issues today. I thought maybe it had to do with upgrading the app on my phone but perhaps there is a bigger problem going on. The app is responding so slowly that it is almost unusable. Most screens won’t even load, however some will but only after waiting several minutes. I switched from using a VeraLite controller to Smartthings and while I like some of the features I’ve not been very pleased with the reliability. Tonight I’m missing my Vera.

Disappointing because months ago (about 6-7) support was on point.

Yesterday motion detectors weren’t firing smart lights, and now having a comically bad time trying to add / modify a smart app.

Only frustrating thing really is that I had been checking http://status.smartthings.com/ for a half an hour or more and it showed nothing, and now, they’re confirming some issues that seem to match with what I’m experiencing.

Also somewhat confused as to why things aren’t failing over to local control vs the cloud; perhaps I don’t understand how that works.

Maybe it IS doing that, I’m just trying to do things that involve the cloud which is presently borked.

Yah… All great points; but frankly, reiterating what’s been said by Community folks dozens of times in various contexts. The result: It’s not the specific failures that are the greatest concern; it is the FACT that SmartThings cannot get their act together: That means there probably has been a catastrophic failure of upper management.

And, seriously: that is either much harder or much easier to fix than technical problems, depending on the “will” of the people who have the authority to make change happen. Should some heads roll? … sooner or later, probably. As I’ve posted elsewhere recently, Samsung will cut SmartThings loose if they can’t figure out how to manage the division. It’s not personal – a LOT of startups have difficulty adapting to the next phase of growth. Entrepreneurs do not necessarily have the skills required to grow and manage past a certain point in a company’s evolution. That’s why there are “serial entrepreneurs”. They should move on to the next success or a few failures and success. That’s what an entrepreneur does. They don’t stubbornly sink their own ships (like the CEO of Quirky/Wink, Ben Kaufman did).

Anyhow… I suggest y’all might as well slide over to the existing, still live, still super popular, relevant Topic, regardless of the tangents it has from time to time:

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Just a note to let you know that all of the founders have read your post here and others like it and are aware of the issues with the platform. We are working on them. I know some will say that this note isn’t worth much. Maybe you are one of those that at least appreciates the communication. Support is still the best place to go to get help with specific issues. They are a great part of our team and add real value for customers when they hit troublespots. That said, they are swamped despite us hiring like mad in that area.

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The community-created wiki has the two links where you can check what specifically is eligible to run locally for you:

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=FAQ

I do appreciate the community and the fact that we are being heard but the constant recent issues are concerning and overall frustrating for most. I hope things become more stable because when ST works, it is great and it has become a fun addiction, but that novelty wears off when there are major outages. Again, I appreciate the time you took to acknowledge and respond. My only comment to the support team being swamped is: hire more support technicians or adopt a better support procedure (i.e. ITIL or something similar).

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We are, we can’t hire them fast enough. Then there is the training aspect. Training new support technicians in our case is unique so it takes time.

It will get better. :smile:

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Good recommendation.

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You’re right. It’s worthless. You continually say “you’re working on it”. WTF? How about explaining what you’re working on, and why you guys seem unable to get it together for months?

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Put yourself in their shoes, Scott. What would you say? Not in general… but specifically in response to the question I quoted from you.

I’ve been in their shoes. And when things are this bad, we’ve disclosed the issues, fully, with a complete description of what is involved in rectifying the problem, and when a fix can realistically be expected.

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Really? For a consumer targeted product/service? In a company with a similar high profile as Samsung?

I’m not debating you; I just find it understandable that most corporate cultures do not extend transparency to the level you describe, and with very good reasons.

The problem is that we are in a “transparency limbo”. I told @Ben the other day, as much as it is hard to respectfully express, that there comes a point at which the cognitive hurdle is just too high to trust apologies and commitments when we’ve been let down repeatedly for 2 years. And I know it’s the complexity of organizational priority juggling and big parent pressures, and who knows what factors at play; so I personally wouldn’t want to make any commitments – or even apologies – for anything that is outside of my control.

Rather than hearing more apologies and acknowledgements and plans… just ignore the noise and deploy a steady and obvious stream of improvements (technical and operational) that will speak for themselves.

Trust is not something you can ask for. It must be earned (yah… I think I’m quoting a brokerage firm or insurance company, or something… but true, no?).

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I can’t figure out what’s going on recently. I’ve had issues with ZigBee reporting status changes left and right. I can get things working briefly via reboots, but it has not been stable for close to a month. Frustrating to no end. ITIL, GAMP, something needs to be implemented.**

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Yes. Annoying, major issues. They have occurred over the last 30 days, mostly.

Nah … they’ve occurred over the past 2+ years.

Hub V2 (and, I guess, App V2) is essential to the scalability and UX progression for SmartThings. Unfortunately, both of these were released too early; with missing promised functionality and significant bugs.

Thus, what could have been a great leap forward is turning out to be a setback.

I’m glad this is getting attention, my home has been on st for just over a year and now I’m bringing my parents houses online. It has been a big disappointment so far, we couldn’t even add users for 2 months. I hope things smooth out soon, I’m still committed to this platform!!

Smart Things clearly intend their product to improve people’s lives as evidenced by the way they publish stories about that, and to some extent it does. However, the reality is that the product and infrastructure just isn’t stable enough to be in a critical role in anyone’s life, and it never will be. This is a product born out of rapid iterative development running on infrastructure that is conceived, deployed and managed in the same way as far as I can tell. None of this is conducive to a “you can count on it” role. There is a fundamental incompatibility between modern development techniques and ultra reliable service delivery.

For my family, I have a child with Epilepsy and he needs to take medicine twice a day. The Epilepsy is controlled by medicine, but missed doses mean he could have a seizure as a result of blood medicine levels dropping to the point of being ineffective. This isn’t theoretical, it has actually happened. Thankfully in that one case he didn’t suffer any ongoing consequences, but the worrying thing is that any such seizure could turn out to be catastrophic in some way.

So what does this have to do with SmartThings? Well, enter the “medicine reminder” application. How perfect is that? I put his medicine in a cupboard with a sensor on it and when the cupboard didn’t open at certain times of the day, I got a text. I then improved the reminder application to also text my wife’s phone besides my own. Outstanding. We quickly realized we were going in the cupboard for things other than the medicine and the reminders weren’t effective. So I got a large pill box, planted a multi-sensor in it, and then rewrote the medicine application to alert if the medicine box hadn’t moved. Cha-Ching! I love being able to tweak this stuff to make it optimal. We then found that our text alerts were not reliable, or we weren’t noticing them them on our phones. So I rewrote the medicine application to ring our door bell as well as sending the multiple texts. How cool is that? Technology solving real world problems and improving the life of a child. Protecting a child, even. The SmartThings model allowing a capable user to design something that really works for them. This sounds like a great candidate for front page heart warming use cases on the website.

… but I would never agree to let this story go on there. Why? Reliability. It just isn’t there. It became clear over the last 2 years that this technology is great in theory and it does work a majority of the time, but there are enough instances of it letting us down that I just can’t promote it to anyone as a reliable option. The issue is that we started to rely on the technology rather than putting in the right effort to remembering the medicine ourselves, and since it can and does not work all the time, we’ve actually found we’ve missed more doses than when we were just channeling all our efforts in to keeping on top of it directly. Sure, I get it that I can’t blame SmartThings for my own lack of perfection in delivering medicine reliably to my child, since it’s my duty, not theirs; I’m just saying that I tried to use Smart Things to help me, and because of the lack of reliability, it’s only marginally helpful when you step back and weigh it all up.

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