tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
41
We’ve offered to do this many, many times.
There are feedback / feature / bug consolidation and voting + priority / status management services out there (UserVoice, UserEcho, … Many more) but SmartThings refuses to implement them nor any alternative.
Their strategy is their own choice: they set their own priorities which may sometimes, but more often than not, include influence from Customer Feedback. It’s not an unusual business model. It’s not how I would prefer to run a Product Management department, but… Not my circus.
For me it’s 90:10! But I am not specifying which is which…! Little exaggerated though!
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
43
Don’t expect this to change anytime soon. It’s inherent in SmartThings culture.
The good thing is that you (and many of us) recognize this and can thus make an informed decision as to whether or not we wish to continue to support this product.
It’s like marriage: don’t get into one if your intention is to change the nature and character of your partner.
My bad… Sorry for jumping to conclusions. Your right about the tension. It’s like every other post is someone complaining about something else. So my apologies for not recognizing the humor and the song. The clash was before my generation
My wife, who has had periods of very low WAF for all of this, actually thanked me today for all of the work I’ve done to automate lighting in our house. That was sweet, especially considering that her closet didn’t turn on this morning, her vanity turned off while she was putting on makeup, and in general it wasn’t a good ST day here.
I love the improvements in the 2.0 hub and software. There is still room for improvement (which I suspect we’ll see), but 2.0 is SO much better. Speed and responsiveness is finally where it needs to be, and the UI is much less confusing.
During the migration from 1.0, I was really close to returning the 2.0 hub and selling the 1.0 on eBay. This was during the phase when I was going through the mandatory removal of literally everything from 1.0. There was the usual lag, lost responses, etc. It took me probably 1.5 hours to get everything removed.
But once everything was removed from the 1.0 hub, the 2.0 experience was the exact opposite. I love the set-up experience - just walk through the house and press the switch on each device to add it, enter a name, and assign to a room. The whole set-up process was done in less than 10 minutes.
Look guys, they made a mistake with the cloud-based everything in 1.0. Engineers and Software Developers make mistakes - it happens. I think they’re doing a great job fixing things, and I expect it will get better and better at a faster pace now that they don’t have to spend so much time trying to band-aid up a bad architecture.
Funny, my wife who ferociously was against updating the switches throughout our home and has constantly complained about how ‘unreliable’ ST has been, asked me ‘…so when are we getting the new hub, again’? …after I brought down our V1, waiting for the preorder of v2 to be delivered! Also, as we were awaiting, she said ‘I cannot believe I’ve got so used to not touch any switches in our home.’ This is what ST means to us. Automation at its best!
What makes you think it was a mistake? SmartThings was originally designed as a remote home monitoring system, to alert users about water leakage or other disasters while they’re away from home. Cloud-based system with “thin” hub was ideal for that purpose. SmartThings was never intended for local control
You’re right. And once all of the Smart App development and installation took off (a.k.a. customization and extensibility), their servers couldn’t handle the load. So they started looking at some form of distributed processing. Plus, v2 does have the possible benefit of reduced response time (lag) too.
I seriously HATE this new app design its is awful and so unsure friendly! I updated my wifi password and for the life of me can’t figure out how to update my wifi setting on smarting UGH!
Gee, I don’t know? Maybe the horrible user experience: slow responses in every UI, dropped events (like lost sunrise/sundown events), user complaints, and - oh yeah - the fact that they acknowledged this approach didn’t work and moved to a different model in 2.0.
It’s not a possible benefit. It’s huge and immediately noticeable. People are really going to notice it during upgrade, because, as I mention above, the process of removing devices and SmartApps from 1.0 is so horribly slow and error prone, but once you’re over on the 2.0 hub, it’s responsive and flawless (at least in my experience).
Faster response? Yes, for the most part. Still a random lag here or there, but much less frequently.
Flawless? Hell no! I have 170 devices - it’s definitely not flawless.
