Yea Wow I thought wink was going to be wonderful, I couldn’t pass up the deal at local Home Depot for $50 and then the next day was the big firmware screw up that broke a lot of hubs. I look at it as a sign there screw up cause me to look around for fixes which lead to a forum post on SmartThings which lead to me buy it and spending thousands of dollars and being hooked on it like a crackhead. I can’t stop checking the forums constantly even at work only to find posts like these.
That’s a good point I honestly hope they implement some sort of stricter moderation before then. I’m not really sure who’s responsible for the forums. Is it @April or @Ben? I would think this topic should be closed now before it turns into 200 pages
Sorry Tim… I would never let it get to that point, but your right that this could lead to nothing good
I do have a real question what are the criteria if any for a topic being closed?
Lazy? Come on man. Do you have any idea how much of a challenge they face with integrating all of these devices and services together? What they’ve done is nothing short of amazing and there isn’t a single other product that you can buy that can tie your home together the way this Hub and app can. Sure, the design of the app isn’t great, but to call developers “lazy” over it? I’m assuming you’re not a software engineer yourself.
People take software WAY too much for granted. There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears behind stuff like this.
I miss the old v1.7.6 crash behaviour. Phone/tablet says “smarthings has crashed. A report has been sent…” and 5 seconds later I’m back on the dashboard. Yeah - get it over with!
Now when v2x. goes south, everything is blank and freezes for 10-20 seconds. Then Android asks if I want to Wait or Ok to kill it. Don’t ask, just kill it! Killing is ALWAYS the answer. The only thing that satisfies.
So I prefer when it killed itself. I don’t want to control it. Don’t make me move my finger. Automation is the key.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
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Well… Oomi Home, and a dozen other campaigns on Kickstarter and IndieGogo propose to do it in under 6 months. And Oomi received $1.7 Million in pre-orders based on that proposition.
Anybody that knows me, knows that I think such campaigns are complete and utter stinky BS.
But it shows that there are a lot of consumers who: (a) are desperate for more options for smart home, and (b) don’t have a clue as to how complicated and risky it is.
Necessity is the mother of invention, but genius + laziness is a good source, too.
I never minded having lazy people on my team as long as they met their deadlines.
To me it seems pretty clear that the deadlines are not being set realistically. Maybe it’s just the typical thing of hardware is hard, and certified hardware is even harder. Maybe it’s changes in corporate direction.
Maybe it’s relying too much on an agile development philosophy, which in my personal opinion is inappropriate for home automation that people rely on. (“Move fast and break things” is a particularly bad idea when you’re working with garage door controllers. )
I’m sure it’s frustrating for everybody. I’m not absolutely sure what would improve things. I guess the only reason I haven’t been more freaked out is because I’ve believed all along that there wouldn’t be a reliable plug-and-play home automation system for my needs for under $3500 until the summer of 2016.
I’m hoping SmartThings will be one of those candidates. They’re not there yet, but we’re another year and maybe another generation away. They’re a good interim solution for me in the meantime for some convenience use cases that I can’t get any other way in my price range.
So I feel the pain of those who are frustrated by the most recent releases. But I think the biggest frustration is there are any great competitors, either. If there were, people could just return whatever it is they happen to have, and get the better one. But every system has pros and cons, and there’s no clear leader yet.
I am brand new to SmartThings, pre-ordered the v2 hub. I have been extremely underwhelmed by the app, especially simple things like landscape mode. I’m seriously considering returning it just because of the lack of app design…
If the quality of the UI is your top requirement, smartthings is not going to be the best choice for you.
I use smartthings because it makes the Amazon echo a hundred times better. I’m quadriparetic, so voice control is very important to me. The combination of the official smart things/echo integration and smartthings’ ability to create virtual switches gives me echo voice control over pretty much anything smartthings can control. That’s huge for me, and not currently available in any other system. (Wink has echo integration, but not the extensibility.)
Other people will have other reasons for using it. People who enjoy programming will find that the open platform nature of SmartThings gives them the ability to add all kinds of stuff. Again not necessarily available on the competition.
But everybody’s priorities are different. There are certainly people who may find another system is a better match for their particular needs.
I agree with you. Those that are unhappy with ST can go to one of the others that charge a monthly fee and will only work work with their devices. The others are not open source so you are limited to what they want you to do. I was with the phone company based service until they dropped the service and dumped us on someone else. I can hardly wait to get my St hub and start having fun with my system.
Jdroberts your comments are less than helpful, and well smug. On “my teams” I don’t allow lazy people. Laziness is one step away from sloppyness, which is evident in the Smarthings app.
There are those of us who expect quality, both in execution and design. If you are happy with settling for inferior products then so be it, we don’t have to.
Your “go to the other guys comments” is also one best served on some of the gaming forums. Are you next going to ask for our “stuff?”
This is the problem with customers now. They jump on a bandwagon so completely that they become blind to it’s inadequacies and issues and fight to protect their beliefs in spite of evidence to the contrary.
Smartthings has had plenty of time and plenty of feedback to release a quality 2.0 app and they have missed the mark seriously in many areas. There is a phrase that describes a pervasive and poisonous mentality in design circles and it’s called “not created here.” ST is suffering from that. If they didn’t design it themselves they don’t want it. That is why we don’t see an intuitive “if then else” logic in the app either. Instead we see the ST teams idea. Does it work? Sure if you can figure out the logic that isn’t intuitive because it’s designed to specifically be different. This is the problem.
I don’t have an issue with creativity I encourage it in “my teams”. However creativity at the expense of usability is a no no.
2.0 is a better app than 1.0, no doubt there, but the obviously missing capabilities that were asked for time and again from the community are pretty much going to be a show stopper when Apple and others come out with the ST killers.
One of my personal heroes is Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, who among other things invented the use of a compiler for programming. She said her motivation was “laziness,” which doesn’t have to mean a lack of standards. Sometimes it’s quite the opposite. It’s a desire to get past the tedious and get onto things which are challenging because they are difficult, not just because they are repetitive.
BS.
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Jeez I haven’t been on these forums much in months. There appears to be tension.