I’d like to say it’s been a fun 5 years with you, but it hasn’t. I moved to the ST platform almost exactly 5 years ago today after years of earlier home automation technologies starting way back with X10. I had seen a lot of promise with the extensibility of the ST platform, the strong development capabilities and a robust developer community.
It was not a smooth ride from the beginning but I chalked that up to a fast-growing platform. And while some of that was true, some of painful unreliability must also be due to really poor platform architectural decisions (remember when sunrise/sunset events broke every day because of database locking issues?) (cloud-based automations instead of local) and the rush to market of unstable features (i.e. every year before CES the platform becomes unstable).
I remember the good ol’ days of Alex Hawkinson bragging that his home automation was completely (and inexplicably) stable while his platform was burning to the ground.
Anyway, after 2020’s year of instability and unreliability, a disastrous app migration and more bricking of my devices, I’ve finally moved my home off of SmartThings and I won’t be looking back.
I found it pleasingly ironic that I finally unplugged my ST hub this week during CES with Samsung extolling all the wonderful future capabilities of the SmartThings platform. Ha, good luck with that based on your track record.
So long and may we never meet again SmartThings.