UPDATE: Recent SmartThings User Experience & Platform Performance

[tgauchat (ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)]

In all honesty, it wasn’t one specific change or incident that caused this. We are constantly working on the SmartThings ecosystem. We are a constantly growing and evolving platform undergoing a lot of improvements, changes, and userbase growth. We’re still trying to identify the root cause.

Thanks for joining the conversation, Benjamin; and for the highly detailed post. It is … nice to meet you.

In all honesty, though, I can’t say that is it particularly confidence inspiring.

Lots of platforms are “constantly growing and evolving”. I guess I can faintly remember the days that eBay had horrendous outages … and GMail, and probably a few other giants.

But that is the biggest concern of all. You see, the current rate of SmartThings growth is trivial compared to your goals; a couple hundred thousand hubs currently growing at, what, a few thousand a month; compared to a couple million hubs (growing exponentially) as Samsung UHD TVs come online and as marketing efforts suddenly reach critical mass and cause another “hockey-stick” of growth?

Your post did mention proactive risk management initiatives, and I appreciate your inclusion of them. I hope you and your team – and the entire company – follows through. Thanks!

[fightingmajor]

Rule Machine is likely to be slightly more reliable, and can do anything a Routine can do, except show up in the special UI position for Routines, like widgets, etc.

Not true. I now use Rule Machine for almost everything and also have the Routines built in the special section for Routines. I can even manually run the routine that was built in Rule Machine by pushing them as well

I set everything up in Rule Machine first, then went back in and created the Routines in the special section, but didn’t selected anything to run when setting them back up. Went back to Rule Machine and created a new rule that says when a Routine button is pushed to run the Rule of what that Routine is supposed to do. Sounds confusing, but it works. I only set them up just in case a routine via Rule Machine didn’t run when it should have.

[Ian_84 (Ian)]

So is SHM working again or not? It was an extremely long-winded update that basically said nothing. And they keep saying they’re going to make improvements to make it better but how can you improve something when you admittedly don’t know what’s wrong with it?

[awc (Allen Crawford)]

or maybe upcoming feature work

I think most would agree with me when I say “please stop working on new features until the existing ones work consistently!”

That aside, SmartThings really needs to work on communication. If I weren’t in IT myself, I’m certain I’d never have found this great community. And without it, I would have never learned of status.smartthings.com, which frankly, I only learned of a couple of weeks ago (I’ve been using SmartThings since last August)!

And without knowing about that web site, what do you think I’d be doing as a SmartThings user right now? Yep, you got it–mashing every button in the app repeatedly and wondering why in the hell nothing is working (and likely making your problem worse as everyone is now increasing load on the system trying to figure things out). We get emails about hub upgrades, why not outages, especially major ones?

Good luck fixing things. I hope this is the beginning of the end of all the stability issues.

[ednc]

Please look into the aeon labs siren as an alert in SHM security. SHM security works again after removing the siren. Addng the siren back causes the arming/disarming to lock up.

[swamplynx (Chris)]

My only wonder is why not put native SmartThings code locally on the V2 hub. SHM and other SmartThings apps should easily be ran natively on the V2 hub. Wasn’t that one of the most talked about things about it?

Yes it was. This was all the rage (vaporware) when v2 was announced. Myself, and probably many many others preordered v2 in search of local execution and were promptly given the shaft when v2 was finally released.

[TriOptimum (Matt)]

Agreed. Please fix the Aeon Labs siren in SHM. Thanks.

[HillbillySUV (B Denton)]

Speaking of vaporware, remember the V1 to V2 migration tool they promised?
Also remember the things page? They took that away from us and told us what a wonderful thing they were gong to be replacing it with. Anyone seen that shiny new things page yet?

[awc (Allen Crawford)]

Or fix anything on that siren. I’ve never been able to change the volume or tone on the thing since I bought it. It just throws an error that I need to fill in all the fields, even though I clearly have. Support wasn’t any help and months later, the problem still exists. Turns out that if you change both values at once (even if you only want to change one) it seems to let you save your change then. Fun.

That’s leaving out all the times when the siren just goes off without any intrusion or when there is an intrusion and the siren doesn’t mute when you tap “mute alarms”. I yanked both SHM and the siren out last night and don’t intend on adding them again for a few days…

[HillbillySUV (B Denton)]

I wonder if they ever considered the long term effect of their current user base losing patience with them and posting negative reviews. I’ve made it a point to put a negative review on their products every time I run across one online.
Until they get their act together, I encourage others to follow suit.

[slagle (Tim Slagle)]

Thanks for all the valuable input guys. I am going to be distilling this information for internal folks. We’re not afraid of feedback.

[Manofice (Glenn)]

My front door look is completely unresponsive, won’t respond to unlock’s or locks. It seems to be my only device not working.

[Mike_Maxwell]

I wonder if they ever considered the long term effect of their current user base losing patience with them and posting negative reviews. I’ve made it a point to put a negative review on their products every time I run across one online.
Until they get their act together, I encourage others to follow suit.

I would agree if I was paying 50 or a hundred bucks a month for ST, but we aren’t are we…

[ndavis82 (Nathan Davis)]

What model siren is it? I have the ZW080-A17 and I’ve never had any issue changing the volume or tone from the SmartThings app.

[swamplynx (Chris)]

I think most would agree with me when I say “please stop working on new features until the existing ones work consistently!”

+110%. The only reason I haven’t jumped ship is the already existing rich feature set and openness that lets us code whatever features we need.

Get full local execution working, sort your cloud out, fix all the other issues with the mobile app, then worry about new features.

[awc (Allen Crawford)]

I’m not at home at the moment to check the specific model number, but it is an Aeon Labs Gen 5. I even returned the first one.

[HillbillySUV (B Denton)]

Maybe you got your hub in a cracker jack box, but I paid $750 for my kit, then spent far more than that on other devices. That may be chump change to you, but that is a significant amount for me.

[HillbillySUV (B Denton)]

I agree 100% what is the use of adding more features to a system that is broken?

[ndavis82 (Nathan Davis)]

That’s the same one I have. Not sure why you have those issues.

[Ian_84 (Ian)]

I agree. At the very least, the SHM portion should always work no matter what. Get SHM to a point where it is solid as a rock and then mess with new possibilities. I would much rather have a device that I can always trust for one important thing than to have a device that can do tons of cool stuff but none of it works very well or consistently.