Updates to the SmartThings Platform

This. Allowing the choice fixes all of these issues so why not just prioritise that?!

If you had asked this question in your poll it would’ve got 100% of the vote!

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Some reason they don’t want to allow us to have choice.

This creates a huge issue with people with multiple homes or who is sharing the access of their home to someone else. Every time someone in another home creates a new device it adds it to my Alexa and then screws up my Alexa. I don’t mind going in once to the Alexa app to disable items and change names, but every time someone else makes a change is insane. And the only " approved" way to control sthm is with the app. No native key pads, I know there are work arounds. So you either have to give others access to your app or do a work around with via virtual stwiches that now exposes your security system to alexa voice control. Raise your hand if you think that is unsafe.

And why not warn us that all our devices were being auto added to Alexa? That created a lot of headaches.

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Why is it so difficult to simply allow us to choose which devices are exposed to voice assistants? There are lots of different reasons WHY people want to selectively choose which devices/routines are exposed. Simply giving us a choice of which ones are exposed fixes ALL the problems, regardless of WHY each person wants that feature. Which we had. And was taken away.

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That is my problem exactly. I have duplicate devices with all 3rd party integrations that also have Alexa skills.

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Ok, finally dove in and made the migration. I had held off from switching to a Samsung account (why fix it if it ain’t broke hint hint) so the migration banner was blocked. . .thought I was just lucky. . . .until I started getting the emails. Anyway, there are now like 3+ gigantic threads with people talking about the migration. Any suggestion on which one is best to dive in on? I have been casually watching this one Get ready to make the switch! so am aware of a lot of the issues, but now need to actually mine through them as I thought I still had plenty of time. I am a pretty heavy Webcore & simulated/virtual device user if that helps frame it.

One specific issue I am trying to address first is that I previously used Virtual Presence sensors to indicate we were home (4, 1 for each family member) and Webcore would update those and adjust Location Mode and STH status. I went that route since presence was so unreliable I wanted an easy way to toggle. Now I can see none of those sensors in the new app. I see one did migrate that was not tied to a specific person (toggled on when guests were over), but from what I can see in the IDE, they are all setup the same. As I understand it, even if I can get them to show up, I can’t toggle them any more, so is the best equivalent path to change them all to switches anyway and just remove the old Simulated Presence Sensors?

Lots of other problems, but getting my home/away working and tied in with STHM is my first goal so all the Webcore things tied to that keep working.

So far a poor experience and a poor use of my time.

@blake.arnold @jody.albritton

Please check the poll results again.

The majority of users care about being able to select what devices they expose to other services, for reasons such as protecting the privacy of their location and avoiding duplicates.

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I already have issues with geolocation and routines not running consistently when I leave and come home and I tolerate it because I’m lazy and I already invested a ton of time getting my entire house setup and programmed.

However, if I as much as have 1 more issue or lose any functionality I’m jumping ship to something like hubitat and it seems most of the community is doing the same.

People like myself have thousands in smart home devices and rely on them daily and you feel taking functionality away and potentially breaking anything is acceptable no matter the reasoning? Typical of corporations.

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Has this ever been said explicitly? That the V2 hub will get the 0.32x firmware…

Theres no reason they wont. Its currently supported and technically has more capable processing and memory than the 2018 and is already at 31.x.

V. 1 wont be getting it, it hasn’t received new firmware for a while and i doubt the ADT hub will either.

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@jody.albritton
I didn’t see any discussion about this point here or anywhere else. Is there details on what will and won’t work after this change? Will this change with custom capabilities or is this something that is intentionally unavailable for custom capabilities?

This migration to a new app/platform should have never started until a backup/restore/migration process was in place.

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The migration should have never started until there was parity between the old and the new. The New App is missing some HUGE functionalities that the Classic App has and without theses, navigating through this “New” app is a complete fail.

I’m getting more and more frustrated.

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Im pretty sure just about everyone here (that’s left) feel the same way. Samsung just does not get it right when it comes ro.software…never did & I think never will. Not knocking the software engineers for smartthings but this whole migration was botched to put it nicely & in the end all these decisions being made lay squately at the hands of management.

One very noticable thing was how things started getting quit when hubitat came out & now. I’m afraid things will get even more quiet after this debacle. I just wonder if someone from amazon is paying any attention to this :thinking:.

That is very true also.

it will be great to have filtering capabilities on automation screen. I have more than 50 automations. scrolling down becomes difficult at times.

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This is the point. The previous version covered all of those concerns and probably more you’re unaware of. Not one of those options covers my specific need, but all of them have not been an issue for me thanks to the way the old version works. I can’t understand why your team would be considering creating a fix that targets just one of those concerns, leaving some others in the cold, when you could create a fix that solves all of them in one hit?

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@blake.arnold

I mentioned this in a different thread today, but I wanted to put it here as well.

It appears that when changing from the classic app to the new app the old method of handling devices which supported central scenes with multiple taps has changed.

It used to be that each tap pattern was spoofed with a different button number. So, for example, for the remotec ZRC90 which has eight buttons each with press, long press, and double tap, the DTH would say that there were 24 buttons.

IMG_2378

[OBSOLETE] Remotec ZRC-90 Scene Master - Button Device Supporting 24 Unique Button Commands (see post 177 for 2021 app version)

The same method was used for many different devices, including the aeotec Walmote quad, The Homeseer dimmer and switch, The inovelli red series, And even the newest GE switch (46201).

This change causes multiple problems. Mirroring no longer works in smart lights, and the devices can go into a feedback loop, which I believe is causing some of the on/off/on/off/reports.

A lot of the button press controls don’t work.

Again, I could be totally wrong on this, but it looks to me like it’s occurring when the DTH spoofed the central scenes by making them look like separate buttons.

FWIW…

@Kianoosh_Karami @Eric_Inovelli

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I migrated this past week and my most important smart app “Routine Director” which dictates what mode my house is in based on time of day and presence stopped working. I have spent 3 days now trying to write WebCore pistons to try and replicate this and I’m still debugging. Shouldn’t something like this have been offered in the new app?

Yeah, I can’t answer the technical side of this as @erocm1231 handles it, but it appears to be related to this answer: Problem with Inovelli RED Series Switch/Dimmer Scene capability in NEW ST App

"the SmartLighting app is now looking for the “supportedButtonValues” attribute. If it doesn’t find it then it causes an error. So the value needs to be populated. For example:

sendEvent(name: “supportedButtonValues”, value:JsonOutput.toJson([“pushed”,“held”]), displayed:false)"

Again, I’m not entirely sure what it means, but I’m guessing this is related to this thread where the new platform is looking for a different attribute than the old platform was and therefore if you have an existing DTH applied written for the old platform (before the update), it will throw an error.

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Big Tech doesn’t like giving users choices. That’s what happened to Google (can’t even count the number of neat services they killed), Apple (the old Mac, and even early MacOS X machines were a tinkerer’s dream, but the iPhone is a walled garden). So it’s not too surprising that it’s happening to SmartThings, now that they are owned by a large corporation.

Actually, it’s a miracle that the customization, coding, and the like have lasted this long under new corporate ownership. Samsung has done surprisingly well in this regard. But I guess all good things have to end.

That said, I think I can live without the old app. I really like SmartThings and I’d like to stay as long as I can. But the moment I can’t write my own custom DTH (and use them with newly-added devices), custom SmartApps, and of course use WebCoRE, is the moment I switch to Hubitat or Home Assistant.

1 Like