The End of Groovy Has Arrived

Device specific fingerprints aren’t required in edge, just as they weren’t required in Groovy. So devices can still work after the Edge migration without them.

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I like to see the numbers on how users are jumping ship and moving to another like Home Assistant and Hubitat.

every single user in this forum could leave to another platform and SmartThings would only lose 0.15% of its user base…

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I came to SmartThings earlier this year FROM HA and Hubitat, because (for me) SmartThings with Edge drivers better supports the gear I have than they did, IF they even support some of my gear (giving you the evil eye Hubitat :smiley: ).

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I’m curious about that, as my recent experience with an IKEA Tradfri bulb, one that appears to have a fingerprint defined (based on digging down deep within the ST Zigbee Switch Edge driver codebase on github), refused to pair with the hub.

It wasn’t until Mariano added the fingerprint to his driver that I was able to add it to my hub.

The generic cluster identifiers instead of fingerprints are currently commented out in the public branch of Edge drivers. So unless you’ve installed the beta drivers manually they won’t work.

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Just my $0.02.

If all of us in this forum leave, it doesn’t hurt Samsungs bottom line. We have already paid for our hubs. They just have less users to support that are not generating any additional revenue for the company. Today 99% of Smartthings users do not even own a hub. As much as it hurts to say, we are not really the focus group for this upgrade.

As much as this upgrade inconveniences me, I for sure got a lot more than $35 I paid 6-7 years ago. Cannot think of another purchase that gave me such a high utility for such a low cost. A bottle of cheap bourbon that lasts 2 weeks costs more.

I am waiting for all the dust to settle and then decide how/if I can live within the ecosystem.

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That’s the weird thing.

I’m subscribed to the ST beta channel and do have the Zigbee Switch beta driver installed on the hub, but it didn’t pick up the bulb when I initially tried to pair it last week.

Going into the app now, I do have the option in the driver area to switch it to the Zigbee Switch driver if I wanted to. I see the driver was changed on September 6th, so maybe they’ve tweaked something since my initial attempt.

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Agreed 100%. Even at the $100 price point the hub has been a great value over many years. That’s why I don’t get the (internet expected) outrage of “Samsung is doing me wrong!” / “Can you believe how incompetent / evil they are!” Edge is a transition, life is change. Being outraged at every little thing just makes living harder.

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In all likelihood, I’ll be migrating to a Hubitat C7 I purchased a year ago. I had been putting off the migration because it seemed like a PITA. But unless the groovy shutdown defies my expectations and everything is still working, I’d rather invest my time migrating to a platform that I hope doesn’t shift from under me. You can’t call this automation if you’re always having to manually maintain it to preserve the status quo.

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Same here . I was told i need to install beta revions of the drivers . i know have the beta drivers and the switch does not pick up the generic edge fingerprint.

And i am kinda getting annoyed with smartthings saying it works and it does not does not work for everyone. And no solution on how to get it to work.

That is an interesting question.

I for one moved over to Hubitat and Home Assistant a while back because I found my lighting was too slow with ST and it stopped altogether if the internet went down.

However, I kept my Smartthings V2 hub running with a variety of sensors purely because I found the app easier to use and get messages than the other offerings from H & HA.

Now with Edge drivers running on the hub itself, I am looking more favorably at ST and have added a few devices back to ST. As Hubitat can also be a PITA and frequently needs a restart and HA is harder to get going for remote access.

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I have 2 Tradfri buttons I just picked up.

One I added without manually adding any Edge drivers because I assumed as the IKEA button is available to add from the Samsung ‘Featured Brands’ list it would automatically get an Edge driver. But it didn’t it has an old driver in the IDE.

The 2nd Button I manually added an Edge driver and forced it on to Edge.

So I will leave these 2 as is and see what happens to them on the ‘great switch over’.

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Right, this is the real problem for me. Honestly, had they communicated proactively a month ago that this was coming up I’d still be happy to use SmartThings, even if it meant (as a power user) finding new workarounds for stuff that used to work perfectly.

But the awful way I found out about this, just randomly happening to check a forum that I haven’t been to in years and finding out everything is going to be entirely upended for me, that’s the problem.

It’s made me angry enough that in the less than three days since I found out, I’ve already entirely disconnected my ST hub and have replicated my setup with Home Assistant, and a Pi 4 and a Zigbee stick I already had laying around. I’ve actually been able to make more integrations with HA than I ever was with SmartThings anyway (like my Midea A/C, my Unifi Protect cameras, perfect presence every time using my Unifi Network / wifi, etc.).

I haven’t used Hubitat but I suspect that will be far more familiar to ST refugees with its use of Groovy. However, if you’re willing to learn pretty much everything from scratch, HA is far more powerful.

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I totally get this and agree I have gotten immense value out of this versus what I pay, but as others have noted, it is the way it is being handled that rubs me so the wrong way. Something that has been working well, and I have grown to really rely on for years, is now being just flushed down the toilet with virtually no notice and very little information. Samsung/SmartThings is a for-profit corporation and if they aren’t making enough money off of the current model then a change is completely justified, but the communication is just about as bad as it gets. “Hey, there is a major change coming asap and it’s likely to wreck your system, good luck!”

As others have noted, if they lose most of the people on this forum, that’s probably a drop in the bucket and not a concern for them. Where it will be a concern is this will be another notch in the don’t trust Samsung bucket like the app transition was. Buying a appliance? No thanks. Buy a phone? No thanks. Buy a TV? No thanks. In fact I just had to buy appliances and how I’m being treated here at SmartThings was a factor in me deciding NOT to buy Samsung. That was a 2.5k loss for them. For me this is like when Google killed Google Music or unlimited Google Photos backup. A virtually free service (although they clearly were harvesting a lot of profitable data probably just like Samsung likely is) that was really excellent and I depended on ended up being flushed down the toilet and I as a user was unceremoniously discarded or asked to start paying for exactly the same level of service.

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I understand, but complaining about it on a forum (to which the engineers from Samsung are the only ones that are likely to hear you) feels a bit like:
image

Vote with your wallet (I do too). But constructive content is probably better during these last days of the Groovy->Edge transition.

Smartthings yearly support costs have been $0 for the entire product. For $0 I don’t feel they owe me any more than what they’ve been doing. They told us 2+ years ago the transition was happening. Maybe it wasn’t with direct phone calls or emails but they told us. If I had a support contract and I received no notice of the switchover I would be upset, but otherwise I felt they notified me with plenty of time to decide what to do. Other smart devices shut down with weeks days or even no notice (Insteon). Groovy->Edge feels like a bargain for the total amount of support fees they’ve taken from me since purchasing the hub.

I’m not a Samsung fanboy but just trying to make the most of Edge, get my devices switched over, and trying to find bugs or issues in the transition. The Edge decision is a done deal. Complaining about it seems like a waste of time to me.

Just my 2c.

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Here’s the thing though. If you’re going to offer something for free (ok, for $100 or less), then if you’re not going to at least send out a series of emails to customers who bought the device to advise them about a big upcoming change which may (or hopefully may not) impact the behaviour of your home automation system, that’s just poor form and shoddy customer service, and it says quite a bit about the philosophy of Samsung as a company. I use a ton of free services from Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, and so many others (yes, some of those are learning stuff about me to throw adverts in my face and who knows what else, I know), and I have always received timely emails about any change in their services, including annoying ones such as tiny changes in the terms of service (services that I am subscribed to but never paid for), but there you have it.

And yes, they told you about it 2+ years ago, but users not on this community (99% of the userbase going by what’s written above) do not know, and I am not as sure as you are that life will be all fresh and rosy for those users come October, after having some of my devices (currently using stock DTHs) fail with the respective Edge driver.

So, all due respect, we might sound like old men yelling at a cloud to you. That’s one way to shrug off our grievances, and I guess that’s also the view taken by Samsung.

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I’m positive the transition will have major hiccups for some users - its just too complex to not. I don’t think things are/will be rosy. I just don’t feel that complaining about lack of notice or decisions already made will help that in any way. Instead I’m doing what I can to make my (and others) transition better. Creating Edge drivers for devices that are not yet supported, asking transition questions, finding bugs, trying to assist.

Perhaps I’m naive and I should be mad at Samsung, I dunno. In the end it seemed more productive to take proactive approach. I’m not shrugging off anything - I agree that things could have been handled better (can’t they always?) but what’s done is done. I was either going to help make my Edge transition better or switch my ST instances to another platform.

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I concur. I jumped ship from Wink when they added subscription charges. ST offers much more than Wink did, without the added cost. While not perfect, most of my needs are met most of the time by ST and I look forward to local execution.

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I think both @martin.borg and @csstup have valid points, which in a sense is just another indication of how confusing this transition has been. It’s still very hard to judge what the impact will be on any individual user. :thinking:

That said, I don’t think you can judge any potential loss based just on the initial financial cost. Many people have also invested huge amounts of time, energy, and trust into their existing setups. Plus the opportunity cost of not having invested that time into another platform. SmartThings has never seemed to understand that kind of investment (the frequent first line advice to delete and re-add demonstrates that). But that doesn’t mean it’s negligible.

Households which rely on automation as something more than a hobby, who have a household member with a physical or cognitive impairment, may have spent months or years creating a system which works well for them. They can’t just switch easily, even to a new ST system.

As for “we were told over a year ago,” we were also told the new system would have full parity with Webcore. It doesn’t. It doesn’t even have full parity with the old routines when it comes to multicomponent devices or mirroring. And no one said until a few weeks ago that some older devices which have worked well with ST for years with stock DTHs will not be automatically transitioned. I have been asking formally since December 2020 how virtual devices would be handled, including for those without a hub, and there’s still no detailed answer. Others have been doing the same thing for zwave utilities and received the same silence in response.

If you are a power user with a hub and zwave/zigbee devices who loses features important to your household , probably Hubitat plus SharpTools is the quickest way to get them back, but even that will likely take two to three weeks of research and transition. And if your household includes an adult with dementia or a child on the autism spectrum, that may be a very painful and frustrating two to three weeks.

Not all costs are measured in currency. :disappointed_relieved:

Just sayin’…

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