UPDATE: Recent SmartThings User Experience & Platform Performance

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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Truth is @bravenel

If you had not created Rule Machine my outlook would be totally different.

Rule by rule I moved from Smart lights to Rule Machine…and back again to gauge reliability and speed.

It took awhile to finally give in and move all my rules over…then when I figured out enough to be dangerous I went wild!

No Smart Lighting and no Smart Home Monitor. No ST routines…all of it in Rule Machine.

At risk of sounding like the 3,000 poster child it really has made a difference and it’s fun to me…I enjoy learning.

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Outside this extended ridiculousness, which shakes faith in them, I will ride this out as well. There isn’t anything comparable and HomeKit isn’t far enough along (Apple house and company) so I think the upside is larger than the down yet. Scale is hard, and I appreciate that so while frustrated at the missteps, I think it’s reasonable these actions have been addressing architectural deficiencies all growth companies discover.

They need to do a bette job messaging and addressing promises…but overall I am sticking for now.

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If you guys haven’t already I’d watch the developer call with Ben Bakken, he does a really good job of explaining what is going on and what is being done to work through it. Ben starts are about the 30min mark.

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My concern is that the competition will misread the cause(s) of SmartThings’s “blown execution”, and drop key elements of “the concept”… Possibly the the “open” development aspect.

To compete in the smart home network, it will probably take a very large player. Apple, Google, Amazon do offer various degrees of “platform API”; but so far, quite a lot less open.

If success turns out to be solely dependant on consumer adoption, then some powerful company could get it right from a consumer viewpoint, and give no or minimal regard to developers. ie., I am not certain that open development is the key to success (though it definitely isn’t the main reason for difficulties).

The concept was cloud based only and they realized it cannot be sustained. They demonstrated that can improve on that concept and they did with v2. Now if they can get a hold on the growing pains, they will be all set. It’s really not a big deal that their usage of their own platform is inadequate, as long as the platform is solid, which by no means it is, but they shown signs of improvement. Not fast enough, sure, not confident enough, sure, not profesional enough, sure, but nonetheless small progress is being made. The Home Automation market is virgin and no start up will own it. It will take big players to make it right and what better support than Samsung. Honestly, I have as much expectations that a newcomer will take the laurels as I do for ST to ‘right the ship’. In the end, we will be no better than we were 3 years ago if none of our expectations are met.

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Pray tell, what are you talking about? It is as bad now as it’s always been, not “improved”. Ask my wife; she is unbiased and uninvested, and pretty observant.

You saw where phantom App commands were doing stuff in @JDRoberts house, right? Have you tried to use the Simulator recently? Did you notice that some of your data just vanished? Need I go on???

Good things come to those who wait…

and wait…

and wait…

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Yup. But, as Tim mentioned, they have a new SPoR in the way of a dir of eng, who comes from a trading transaction BG. Quite possible he’ll get the backend straightened out. Of course, the call made no mention of the sad state of the mobile apps, and who in the heck is responsible for that.

And, as I mentioned long ago (pre acquisition), Samsung’s plans for this are most likely NOT going to align with mine regarding HA.

What Google has done in the past three years has impressed me. It is now in my pocket, in my vehicle, on my TV, and on my wrist (although only occasionally). It knows me well enough to be truly smart (sometimes eerily so). My gut tells me they’ll sort out the home in the next year or two, and that is what I am waiting for.

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Correct on no zigbee. But it offers up Insteon in return. I am hopeful they will get the locks sorted out soon, but not a deal breaker for me as I don’t use them (and certainly wouldn’t with SmartThings at this point even if I had them; same with my garage door).

Indigo is certainly more expensive than a SmartThings hub, but note that a more than capable for this application, used Mac Mini, can be had on the 'bay for a couple of hundred. And having a super low power consuming computer on your LAN 24/7 opens up a whole bunch more possibilities.

Their concept was, but not what the public saw and went for. How many people come here and find out that every event goes to/from the cloud, and go “say what?”

What I meant was the concept as perceived by consumers, not ST’s implementation or internal vision. I think their internal vision was fundamentally flawed. But, it is what it is, and as flaky as a $3 bill. They identified a market segment, but are failing to serve it well.

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But not flaky enough stop stop Samsung from paying $200 million for it … and who knows how much more costs sunk in by now.

Sigh… On the wild speculation side again; my belief is that some folks at ST think effort should be concentrated on local execution in order to reduce cloud workload. But there surely are other folks that know the cloud must stand on its own because I believe that the Samsung TV SmartThings feature will be cloud-based (it is mostly just an add-on ZigBee / Z-Wave USB stick); I’m assuming not a full hub. TV’s aren’t replaced very often, so putting Hub V2 functionality in them would not be cost effective. (speculation only!!!).

In other words – SmartThings is on the way to reducing cloud dependence, but is having hurdles thrown at it (in addition to the general complexity of building a hybrid architecture on top of the legacy platform).

Yea, like I’m on the way to Valhalla. :grinning:

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I speak of my personal experience and my barometer is also my wife. lol. I don’t deny the poltergeist’s existence, because I experienced it first hand a few months ago. But since those days I didn’t really have any major events. And more importantly I haven’t heard my wife say once ‘I wish you would unplug that box because it’s not working again’. I know I got lucky or the fact that I set up my hub as if I was using the Wink hub - preparing to jump ship - may have saved me from some of the problems people have had in recent weeks. But the fact is that my routines fired consistently, my modes didn’t get stuck, my motion operated lights have worked (I did get hit by increased lag for couple of days, but things bounced back). So from my point of view, although ready to move on, I have had no real reason to migrate everything (yet).

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Only SHM has failed for me recently. Everything else, rock solid.

I tend not to change things a lot, especially during 'storms". I run as much local as possible, the rest in Rule Machine, Routines and Modes.

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I have phantom events every day, and devices drop off almost every day. I have high lag times sometimes, I have no response at all sometimes, every day. This has been going on forever. Recently it’s been worse, with the device dropouts and the lost application state from their database, and the buggy release of the new scheduler. @Ben once responded to a post I made along these lines by saying, “this is not the expected performance”. Yep.

It works sort of? Sometimes? But my wife feels that unreliable automation is worse than no automation. There is a line somewhere that I’m way too close to every friggin day.

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Bruce

do us all a favor and find a way to build a HA hub for us with RM at the core

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Give my regards to Lagertha.

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