UPDATE: Recent SmartThings User Experience & Platform Performance

I agree completely. But, aren’t all of your requirements able to be controlled via their own separate app?

The convenience of ST bringing it all into one is the real power of the system, along with the ability to bring on board just about everything that is physically able to connect with the hub.

I know I’m here because the convenience of the ask in one power is greater than the issues and down time.

Well, that’s just one of the reasons.

I have lost track of the amount of issues i have, and this latest outage just seems to keep dragging out, i have had Hue issues, countless problems with presence sensors, and my routines haven’t worked properly for weeks, today was the last straw, i have a routine that locks the door when i leave, it hasn’t been working correctly since the smart things service started having problems, but today i couldn’t even lock the door remotely when i noticed, same issue on my GF’s phone, the service and solution just isn’t ready fro prime time, and i am tired of being a beta tester.

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Okay… So what’s your plan?

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I understand

…but the alternatives are:

A. When it Jacks up do whatever you need to manually (my choice)

B. Go back to manually doing everything all of the time

C. Find another consumer grade solution

D. Go with a professional solution with no adjustability that costs out the tail end

The irony of this is we act like it’s such an inconvenience when it doesn’t work, yet we threaten to go back to manually doing everything; granted, sometimes it’s a pain to fix it!

We’ve all been through all of these.

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choose option B. It will save you oodles if time.

ST isnt home automation its home debugging practice!

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This… for the love of all things Holy, this! People just don’t get the level or irony.

I’ve got a good story around this…

My distant 3rd cousin is staying w/me because he cheated on his wife and got kicked out of his home…anyway…good preface

Prior to my giving him a place to live I tried to explain how the system works, etc. He paid no mind but got the concept that the GE switches act as regular dimmer switches. He poked his fun at it all…we’ve all heard it.

One day he and my girlfriend were in my downstairs living room during a ST sh!tstorm. They turned on my tv which is supposed to turn off my living room lights (on a GE dimmer switch not 4 feet from them both). He would tap off the switch and the motion sensor would turn it back on…over and over he did this.

Finally they both yell at me and interrupt my working to tell me “the lights won’t stay turned off”…and wanted to know why it did that and why I couldn’t I fix it. The common stuff people do when they want to prove their simplicity is so much more intelligent than your over complicated home automation…they got me!

I politely said “it’s a dimmer switch guys…you do still know how to work a dimmer switch…right?..what happens when you tap a dimmer switch?”

I proceeded to dim it down by HOLDING down on the button (lol) below what the led could process and explained that I can’t control if there are cloud issues but all switches still function as their non-smart counterparts.

“Well that’s just stupid” he said…i retourted “which part…the part where the home automation didn’t work or the part where you forgot how to dim down a dimmer switch?”

That all still cracks me up lol…oh the irony.

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E. choose a more reliable system in the same price range, but give up some features.

This is easier if you have specific use cases you want to solve and you’re not trying to future proof against every possible IOT option. :wink:

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Currently working on an openhab solution, i like the fact its both local and remote based which means if there is an issue with internet, service etc i can still actually control my house.

Its definitely not as use friendly but does seem a lot more powerful

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One of my two GDOOZ garage door controllers just stopped responding. I know it was opened and closed today, but the logs show nothing. Now I can’t even open/close it from the ST app. It shows opening, then reverts to closed. I had a minor freak out when I saw my father-in-law’s car in my driveway for several hours but had no record of any doors ever opening. Turns out he swapped cars with my wife for the day, but since her garage door isn’t responding I had no friggin clue. Guess I’ll have to exclude and re-include. Always fun with the furthest z-wave device from your hub that is also bolted to the ceiling of the garage. GRRRR!!!

Most. ST can do:

  • Control my blinds through Amazon Echo
  • Automatically enable/disable my SimpliSafe alarm based on geofence

Everything else can be done with separate apps or even purchasing more hubs. The above 2 ONLY ST can seem to do at this point.

Not in my case, I am using own apps (but mostly IFTTT) for Abode Security, My Q, Arlo, Nest, Harmony and Wemo. I only have zigbee/zwave, Echo, Sonos and Hue hub connected to ST. The reason I am not switching to another hub is that I am too damn lazy to migrate 150 devices to a different hub that performs the same or worse than ST. Plus the flexibilty of ST is amazing. There are horror stories with every other hub like Wink, Vera, Iris, etc, but none have the power of ingenuity to find workarounds like this community has!

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I have the same problem with my GE bulbs for 2-3 days now. Raised a support case yesterday, haven’t heard about it yet from them. It works from the app, but no smart apps related to GE bulb works. Also ST doesn’t log any activity on the bulb.

YUP!

I deleted half a dozen smart apps yesterday. I’m paring down, down, down in anticipation of switching over to Indigo. Just looking for a free weekend where I can un-pair everything, replace what won’t work with the new system, and start working with Indigo.

E.X.A.C.T.L.Y.!!!

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BTW, you can use HAM Bridge to communicate to Indigo from any SmartThings you may have left over. I still use SmartThings for presence and some motion (including the original USB powered one for power outage notification).

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Seems like a cool product.

Because I own no apple products intentionally, switching to Indigo would be ridiculously expensive. I belive it doesn’t support Zigbee…right?

…and no lock control…correct? Drew deal breaker.

I’ll ride things out. Being I live alone, no outage is THAT bad and I’d have to say for my application the platform has performed better than I expected in flexibility and not as expected in reliability.

Overall I’m pleased…but if the same was offered for an Android platform I’d be in deep contemplation.

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I would have added, “Or the part where you’re having to figure out the lights in my house because you got kicked out of your own?”

But that’s just me. :smirk:

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I have virtually no hope for ST, and yet I’m still using it. I have more hope that a replacement will become available. They’ve demonstrated a concept with some appeal, but they’ve blown the execution. ST is ripe for competition. I have an order of magnitude higher expectation of a decent replacement appearing than I do of ST getting this “system” to work properly.

Oh, and I’d love to be proved wrong about ST, but really?

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LMAO!

I just spewed my chinese!

…wait, that sound too…oh nevermind it’s out there now

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