UPDATE: Recent SmartThings User Experience & Platform Performance

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.

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

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

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

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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.

+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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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Yup, I have a lot more than that invested, probably 10 times that, and it’s not chump change for me either. In the end your only loss is the cost of the hub, all the devices can be used in your new system of choice… the hub ends up being the only loss.

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The value of more features instead of 100% focus on stability?: To keep marketing people and product managers employed; and keep shareholders who look at top line sales figures happy.

It’s the same reason that there’s no chance that SmartThings would halt all sales as a risk management strategy.

More seriously: Various initiatives have been significantly deferred. Unfortunately, deferred features is also disappointing for existing customers. Very hard to win in this situation. Just have to … wait.

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Just a follow up, most of the “new features” are geared towards stability.

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WOW - There is a lot of pent up frustration from what seems like a lack of updates that when you guys finally produce, a very legit update, you get slammed for it.

Look the system blew up, they aren’t quite sure what happened, and they are working hard to get it resolved. I think it was very clear that the system is still not up and they don’t have a root cause to determine LOE / timeline for getting it up. Honest updates are better then silence. More importantly why don’t we let them fix the problem before we hang them for what they could have done to avoid it.

I love the “cloud developers” jumping into to give their experience. Multi-billion dollar companies have the means to over expand and plan. I can tell you from experience start-ups (regardless of having big backers - which STs is) typically have to run just under capacity because it’s either that new rack of servers in the cluster or that engineer to develop all the stability features the system desperately needs and all it takes just one unexpected event to tip the scale.

As a ST “fan boy” that has very openly complained about operational / support updates and communication this is certainly a step in the right direction. Please keep giving us updates as you can.

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I couldn’t agree more. This is not a development issue, rather, a lack of management and vision from an engineering perspective. All the server resources in the world won’t make up for poorly executed architecture.

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Ya, where is that tool… I haven’t migrated yet.

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I hope you guys are distilling something else over there in parallel to help dull the pain. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I started in the world of startups and moved my way up. I’ve had my fair share working in environments where we had to get creative and find ways to make things work. At no point in time at any of the companies I worked for (regardless of budget) did we ever provide such a poor user expirence. We might not have always hit five 9s but we did everything possible to put stability, reliability and performance first (in that order). New features, bug fixes and code changes were only released after THROUGH testing in QA, performance/scalability testing, impact assessment, pre-release, limited release then general availability. SmartThings uses the ‘push once’ approach where once the code is complied it gets pushed straight to production. In fact, I would bet they are pushing a new branch as we type.

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Excellent, excellent point. Relying on remote servers and varying loads is stupid. Move functionality to the hub.v

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