Facebook didn’t need the 100 yr old wirings! Neutral or common wires… Device types or smart apps or what not…they didn’t need to hook up zigbee or zwaves… Only girls in the campus! 
it was the wave length in Physics and the Chemical reaction followed the biological stuff!
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The real world is much more difficult than the ephemeral world of social media. A billion users is meaningless in this context. These are real homes, with real people living in them, and real walls, lights, wiring, etc. etc. Even a new home is like that, and none of this is easy to do. You can pay for an expensive turnkey system like Control 4, or just an expensive lighting system like Lutron, but an automated smart home is way beyond anything the trades can do. That’s why all of us techie types are doing it for ourselves. 
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I would say a really - really long time. There would be so many challenges with local codes, builder warranty and installer certification. I just can’t see it. At least not until this stuff runs 100% locally with a near perfect operation record.
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That’s why this is an exciting time to be a developer. The killer app for having a smart home has not been invented yet, which means the field is still wide open for entrepreneurs and innovators. Today all we are doing is inventing new ways to do the same old stuff. Turning on lights and having some sort of alarm system is just the beginning of the story.
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If I could like you post more than once, I would!!
I think this is the current argument about Smartthings; It has no clear rails. The landscape is pot-marked with various and a varying infrastructure to do many things but Adopters are left having to lay their own tracks to get even some basic tasks accomplished. What I have seen is that people want that simplified “railed” system so they can pick up and go from the start but also be able to tweak and modified as needed to fit their own individual needs if necessary.
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Philips Hue is pretty darn close to this description. It’s extremely easy to set up, practically plug-and-play, yet it’s fully programmable, with open API, both local and remote. Granted, it can only control lights as of today, but this limitation is by choice rather than anything else. I think they pretty much nailed usage model and proved that you can create a system that is both user-oriented and developer-friendly.
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Couldn’t it be argued that it’s much easier to develop an app for one specific function that it is to develop an app as flexible as smartThings?
I believe, Hue’s “secret” is that they didn’t try to be original. They use time-tested concepts of scenes, timers, alarms and simple but intuitive visual controls and they make the most out of it.
Their mobile app is elegant, functional and easy to navigate. There is no confusion, no clutter, no five-level deep menus. A simple nav bar on the left that goes out of the way once you make a selection. Most operations take two clicks tops. A singel screen can display 25 scenes on iPad. You can control all your lights from a single screen, including brightness and colors. Compare this to clunky, confusing and unintuitive design of SmartThings that even after more than two years on the market and second major software upgrade still does not have a native iPad app.
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I will chime in here. I am not new to IoT, but V2 is my first jump into ST. There was 0 documentation in the box with the hub. Just a pamplet
1 install app
2 plug in hub
3 add things.
That’s it. It doesn’t even mention where to find all these app and drivers you need to actually add ,control or automate your “things” .
While this forum is great and there are a lot of people ( @JDRoberts ) that seem to be here 24/7 and willing to help everybody. That said being " a guy" and knowing that I should be able to do this myself, I don’t want to have to publicly ask for help, nor do I want to call/chat with support 10 times a day.
This forum is a hot mess, nothing is organized , searches are hit/miss. I just got the announcement from Amazon that they added ( extremely limited 1 way) integration with Echo and Amazon TV. I know I have been in a couple active threads discussing Echo, but searching for Echo ,the first 5-6 hits were from 2014 and Echo’s release. The next 5-6 were from 6 months ago and how to work-around ST and Echo not working together. The active thread finally came up at #23 of the 25 hits. Shouldn’t the most recently active threads be first ?
Yes there is a WEALTH of information in these forums, but it is a full time job to try and find what you are looking for. Most of the time I don’t even know what I am looking for, because I don’t know what is out there. Just when you think you’ve found it, the next day you discover a different thread about a different app ,by a different codeslinger that does what you wanted better. Every time I login, there are 50-70 new threads. Usually withing the first few replies is a link to an old thread that discussed the same thing and a solution.
Okay , I’ll step down off my milk crate now.
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It’s true that there is a lot going on here. What’s your suggestion to improve it? Complaining is easy peasy, and basically devoid of value add for anyone.
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Sure, but I think if you just look at SmartThings’ actual competition, Home automation controllers, most of them handle rule set up better than the V2 version of the Smartthings app from a typical consumer’s point of view.
Iris, wink, staples connect, insteon , ADT, and Fibaro all have fairly similar rules engines. Several, like Iris, put the setup features into a website “super dashboard” version, and limit the phone app to daily activities, but I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
The systems don’t offer the same options to developers as SmartThings, but that’s kind of a separate issue.
If consumer reports took a list of eight smart home scenarios for a typical suburban family with two working parents, two school-age kids, and a dog and ran each of these HA controller competitors through the same list, I think SmartThings would come out on top once the rules had been set up.
But I also think they would come out on the bottom for the process of setting up the rules.
That’s the disconnect I meant by my original comment about being more like Homeseer.
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The company should provide a full set of start up documentation equal to that provided by competitors in the space.
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The company should provide a Wiki. The more open the system, the more necessary a wiki becomes. People need to be able to find the exact model of device they are considering and benefit from the prior experiences of other community members. But they also need to be able to just look for “siren” and find a list of links to individual devices.
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The wiki should be separate from the forums. They serve different purposes.
Those would be my first three suggestions. 
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It wasn’t so much a complaint as a statement of the facts. As somebody coming into ST , I can see very clearly how some ( if not most newcomers ) can get overwhelmed and not know how to actually set it up and use it to it’s abilities. The current system is weighted heavily towards the developer and puts a general consumer at a severe disadvantage, unless they really put in the time and effort to actually figure it out. I don’t see the general consumer walking into BestBuy ,buying a hub, then going home ,stumbling across this forum and spending a week or two researching how to actually set it up.
Heck it took me 2 days to figure out how to get into the api, I ( wrongfully ) assumed that it would be LAN UI for the hub, not an actual web UI. There are 1000’s of mentions of custom apps and device types and editing code. Nowhere ( that I found) in any of the official documentation ( company sticky posts in forum) is there an actual link and instructions to access it though. I found it purely by accident when I clicked on somebody’s post of a custom app they had made and I clicked on " truncated see more" or whatever it says. Which opened up github and asked me to sign up/sign in
I only figured out how to find, access the logs when I was trying to help one of the codeslingers diagnose an issue I had with his app.
As much as I hate Wikis , I am really surprised than if not ST, somebody hasn’t sat down and put one together on exactly how to get started. Giving all the “must have” information and links on where to find it .
Right on cue as I am mentioning a Wiki, here comes @JDRoberts with a comment suggesting a WiKI
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I think the ST guys assume(d) – incorrectly – that people aren’t as stupid / lazy as they really are.
As I mentioned before, I picked up two Linear GD00Z-4s from Lowes yesterday, and they were both open boxes and one of them looked like a return. My guess is that someone had picked them up, went home and tried to install it, it didn’t work and they stuffed them back in the box and returned them. I say this with high confidence because the mounting screws looked like they had been used and one of the tilt sensors had the sticky pad removed (likely when they removed it from the garage door to put it back in the box).
Most people that I know go to a big box store to pick something up that works, right now, out of the box. You buy a TV nowadays and plug in 2 cables and you’re off to the races. Same goes with home routers and smart thermostats or whole-house audio speakers or whatever… you draw the instructions in crayon and make sure that things just work when people take it home, and people with issues are edge cases, not the norm.
If it takes too much time to “make it work” or it’s too convoluted to “do what it says in the box” then people are just gonna pack it up and return it.
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Wasn’t WPS invented because people were not smart enough ( too lazy) to actually remember how to put in their own WiFi passwords ? Yet ST wants consumers to spend hours,days,weeks in an unpublicized forum to figure out how to get their hall lights to come on when they open the door and their outside lights to come on when it gets dark.
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While I do agree about better information magement, you have to give me this…ST did finally ad a very usefull place for info:
Homeseer was never that into detail!
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Yet again it is just their choice of words. When I see a link to contact support, I am not immediately thinking that is where I need to go to actually get documentation on how to set it up.
Under " What do I need to use Smartthings" A hub and an app. That is all it says !!!
That is as good as the manual in the box ,Page 1 install app, Page 2 plug in hub,page 3 add things . You’re all set.
Those of us who’ve been here for nearly 3 years have made dozens or even hundreds of suggested improvements – the vast majority of which are ignored.
SmartThings is gonna do what SmartThings wants to do.
It’s also not the Customer’s responsibility to propose solutions. Customers have the right to complain (or cease being a Customer). The amount of appreciation the Community receives from SmartThings varies, but is still far too small. Hopefully we appreciate each other … but, we are still limited in our ability to build and deploy solutions.
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Plus JIRA or some public bug tracker that people can contribute to/monitor.
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