Stringify shutting down (April 2019)

Looks like Stringify is shutting down it’s service. A lot of folks speculated this would happen after the Comcast aquisition and it looks like they’re right. Interestingly, they recommend Webcore if you’re a SmartThings user.

https://www.stringify.com/stringifyshuttingdown/

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Yep, saw that coming. :disappointed_relieved:

Comcast had no reason to continue to provide it to non-Comcast customers.

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I think it’s pretty neat that they mentioned web core.

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Will WebCore work after SmartThings drops groovy apps?

Not unless it’s rewritten and some hosting solution is figured out.

There is always Hubitat if this doesn’t happen.

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Yep. There are some alternative hubs which don’t have a required cloud component and therefore would continue to run even if the company supporting them went out of business. You wouldn’t get new features, but the stuff you had running the day before the company shut down should continue to run except for any pieces that had cloud integrations.

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This really does suck because this was by far one of the best and most complex home automation systems I had flows with about hundred items in it which had 4 or five triggers and paths threw the flow. I’ve tried Yonomi in the past and stayed with stringify because it lacked what I needed and the amount of compatibility at the time. This was a long time ago when I mostly used wink so I know it has grown since. But between this shutting down and the 2 items, I had of lowes system that just shut down which never worked anyway. a lot is changing in the smart home area.

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I don’t mean to nitpick, but it is important to have some perspective. These two changes are hardly comparable.

  • Lowes Iris was a for-profit product line from a top multi-national big-box retailer with non trivial initial cost and ongoing fees.
  • Stringify was a completely fee-free app with a limited user base, no revenue streams, bailing investors, and a disinterested parent company (Comcast).

As “power-users” we see a very distorted picture of the “smart home” industry.

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Yea - I agree with @tgauchat here. One could see the Stringify shutdown coming a mile away and many predicted it a nanosecond after the acquisition. It was a super cool GUI.

Fortunately the only thing I was using them for was to trigger alerts in ST when I changed locations like leave work, but I can also do that with IFTTT. Anyone else know of a way to do this without using a third party app like IFTTT? I don’t think you can add a non-home location to the Life360 app.

I’m pretty sure you can, I know people use it for school and sports locations when tracking their kids.

Edited to update

Here you go: I don’t know if this works exactly the same way now, this post is from 2012, I just remembered reading it at the time.

https://www.life360.com/blog/new-feature-places/

It is very easy to do and best of all, you do not have to be at the location in order to make it a Place!

What about webCoRE presence?

Thanks @JDRoberts I will take a look. Limit to two places for now.

And @jkp Webcore presence won’t work for telling me if I left work.

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are you sure? I thought if you installed the webcore mobile app and set up presence sensor on it, you could enable multiple locations, i.e home, work etc

from webcore community → multiple location geofences with events departed/arrived location (i.e. arrived home, departed work, etc.)

I think you Could also create a second location in SmartThings and add mobile presence to it.

Wow, thanks I didn’t even know there was a webcore app, will check it out

And regarding Life360 I added other locations but the ST app still only uses one to do notifications

Using my modified version you can use webcore to notify the extra places you add in Life360

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Sweet. This is just what I needed. I could set other webcore locations but I couldn’t figure out how to use them in a piston. This update Life app is even better so I won’t bother with the webcore app. I bought it anyway so maybe it will still be useful for something else.

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Once you create the places in the webcore app, you probably need to add them in your webcore instance in settings : available devices before they are available in your pistons

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