Thank you! First, for listening. Second, for addressing the problems and communicating what you’re doing. I have developed an unfortunate love/hate (mostly love) relationship with SmartThings that started out as pure love and excitement. I sure want to get back to the love part.
Reliability is the single most important thing. Second, for me at least, is trustworthiness. There, I’ve also been disappointed. We’ve been told “this will roll out next week” too many times (and some of those promises are more than six months old at this point with no updates - at this point, Customer Service doesn’t even respond to my inquiries about a few things). It’s really disappointing.
I truly believe these are growing pains that the company can resolve. I look forward to loving you all again.
it seems we answered the questions, offered to live chat and even get him on the phone. We are just waiting for a response/action on your end @mwwhited. I encourage you to reach out to Support, in any case- just shared with them what you said here we will be standing by for you. Cheers!
Apparently people aren’t allowed to work. Your answers still didn’t resolve the issues. The performance of the network is still slow. I was finally able to get a device to pair this morning (after trying for more than a week.) It really shouldn’t take several minutes to get a device to pair that is right next to the hub/controller. (This is not my first Z-Wave controller.)
I can understand minor lag at times but when Off messages are never received even after a device was successfully turned On really doesn’t make any sense. If this is what to expect to see at stability improvements I really think I need to move on to a device that actually runs locally. Again I had really high hopes for your products but by initial wow factor is gone.
It’s also sad that the only reason I got a second look from support was because I called the issue out on this forum.
I sent them a ticket last week and they just told me to look at the status.smartthings.com which is a totally useless answer. I sent this a second ticket this morning which is what April is referring too. She stated it like there were wanted in me but again, there was nothing for me to post back other then their suggestions did not resolve anything on my network.
Her post makes me look like an idiot but really the problem is their lack of response and slow servers. And the way she threw this issue back at me just annoys me more. I had previously recommended smartthings to several of my friends. I have since retracted my recommendation. The network delays, outages and lack of professionalism really doesn’t impress me with their product. Hounding me about their network issues isn’t going to change my opinion either.
I really wanted this product to work but I need something I can rely on. Not something that I have to fight with and constantly reissue commands and hope it will respond sometime in the near future.
STs support is rockstar and honestly want nothing more then to help you! Plus, I think @april is the nicest person on planet earth… possibly the universe?
I truly hope to see you around here for a long time man. Choose wisely if you choose to switch from STs… I’ve had them all… They’re dogmeat in comparison.
Oh! I feel terrible for making you feel that way. That is not my intentions. I was letting you know that they’re ready to assist you when you are.
I understand you are frustrated with our platform, we too acknowledge that it hasn’t been a smooth ride. Jeff, our CTO, briefly talked about some changes to how data is being processed, which should minimize the hiccups. Those changed should be in effect in the very near future (A few weeks, give or take). We thank you for your patience with us.
@darryln it was my mistake… not ST fault…i can’t have them replace it… Now that v2 is a few months out… guess i have to live in a #dumbhome for a while
Good update on the state of things. I do hope there is some sort of incentive for the early adopters on Hub v1 when it comes to going to v2, since we are definitely helping to show where work is needed on the platform.
Also hoping it’s been thought of to add in some more readily accessible Sunset +/- features, it would help for load balancing the number of requests on your end, and definitely makes sense at some times of the year to have lights turn on say 1hr before sunset/sunrise. Awesome platform though and it is exciting to watch it grow.
Sounds good. When’s ther release date? I’d be interested in beta testing. Any plans for a desktop/large screen interface? Managing a large implementantion on a phone is ridiculous.
Since this was posted, the mobile app updates for both android and iOS were released with many different types of problems. Things which previously worked stopped working. Some things became so slow that it was functioning the same as not working at all.
During approximately the same time period, New backend changes caused some of the most popular custom smart apps, including smarttiles and Hello
Home Phrase Director and Smart Alarm, along with a number of custom device types including those for eco-Bee and some smart bulbs, to also have numerous errors.
TRENDS
So on a “walk the walk” basis, I have seen a downward trend in the stability of smartthings. Whenever anything goes wrong, I always assume that the first thing I need to check is smartthings. And the first place I need to check is this forum, because the changes often have nothing to do with my particular installation.
I am quadriparetic, and consequently reliability is very important to me. I don’t have the same plan B options that able-bodied people do. In fact I can’t “just turn on a light switch.” I like the smartthings staff very much, I like the smart things vision very much, and I like the smartthings community very much, but I am frustrated that stuff that worked very well for a month or two just suddenly stops working.
DEVELOPERS NEED MORE INFORMATION
Since the developer community is so important for the things that currently give smartthings its reputation and its competitive advantage, I would really like to see an improvement in the information that well-established developers get about infrastructure changes.
I hesitate to give any specific names, because I know I would be leaving a lot of people out. One of the great things about smartthings is that it isn’t just solving a standard set of 10 or 12 use cases, it’s covering a great variety of scenes and devices through the custom code extensions that the community has developed.
The fact that it’s these very developers who have to spend many hours trying to figure out why code that worked on Monday has stopped working on Tuesday concerns me. A more robust developer channel, even if it’s limited access and requires NDA’s, would benefit the community as a whole.
PRESENT. TENSE.
Meanwhile, I just don’t feel safe relying on smartthings for anything but pure convenience at this point. I have a setup using hello home actions, no custom code, which lets me into my house when I arrive. Last night, that app failed to fire because of a presence detector failure, and the Plan B which involved manually firing through the official smartthings mobile app also failed, because the dashboard would not load.
So there I was, in a wheelchair, in the rain, at 10:30 at night, unable to get into my house because SmartThings had failed me in two different ways. Fortunately my housemate was home, and I was able to get him to come out and let me in.
I don’t expect any powered system to be perfect, but I feel I can now only use SmartThings for use cases that save me a bit of time. I’m still happy when it works, but since I’m removing the automatic entry options I’m now about $50 past the point where I feel I got my money’s worth.
I had already been putting off the big home automation projects until summer 2016, because I believe there will be many more competing ecosystems to consider at that point for a reliable plug and play option under $1500 for the basic use cases I need, and under $5,000 for my particular “bells and whistles” scenario.
But while I do see people working hard on providing Individual improvements and fixes, I am not seeing an overall improvement in stability. I am starting to back off on some of the things I was using smartthings for, just for safety reasons.
It’s been less than 24 hours since I posted about being in my wheelchair, in the rain, at 10:30 at night and being unable to get into my house because SmartThings failed me two different ways.
You can now add a third. We have a contact sensor on the front gate. We set it up to text us when it opens. This would then alert my housemate to come let me in at the front door, giving him a minute or so to pause his game/movie.
Last night automatic SMS texts failed. I see from the forum that other people are having the same issue.
It’s hard to know what else to say. Is there a “three strike” rule in home automation?
More like 27 strikes. Keystone Kops. Fix one thing break two others. Proclaim that all will be good soon, then make it worse.
I’m back to multiple ST failures per day across the board. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of apparently solid days in the past 9 months, and on those I probably just missed seeing the failures.
ST is seriously messed up in their engineering discipline, testing, and QA. Ridiculous.
@alex and @hagins , you really should be ashamed of this cluster f**k.
My garage door opened by itself after I left the house this morning.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
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I just can’t bring myself to “like” your post, because it is certainly not good news.
I’m glad you’re sharing it though, as it helps me understand the extent of the difficulties being experienced. I don’t want to jinx my own system by saying it has been rather more stable… But I’ve limited my more critical optimizations as a precautionary measure.
There aren’t that many user issue reports here on the Forum, relative to the number of Members. Are most Members not active or have limited setups that avoid problems? Or paused self-reporting?
The majority of SmartThings Customers aren’t “Community” members, … Tech Support Team must face quite a few challenging days, I guess.
Honestly, I ought to apply to work for that group, as it would be an excellent education and really build customer service skills, and it’s an opportunity to facilitate communication of customer experience with the ST operations and engineering teams. I sincerely hope I could be of service.
we will be standing by for you. Cheers!
I was letting you know that they’re ready to assist you when you are.
your post, because it is certainly not good news.