I’ve been a software developer and project manager for over 30 years. If I presided over a migration like this, I would be in the unemployment line.
Stupidly, I updated the Alexa integration and immediately ended up with tons of duplicate devices. Why couldn’t upgrading the Alexa integration prevent duplicates? Maybe there’s some valid technical reason, but I’m skeptical. In any case, things seemed to work so it wasn’t the end of the world.
Later that day, Alexa started telling me that almost every device is offline, even though NOTHING is offline and every device is working correctly. So I disabled the Alexa skill, deleted every ST-connected device and enabled the skill again. Still, it’s reporting everything is offline. Fantastic.
Then I remembered something about device status being changed, and hubs with pre- 0.32 firmware “will use hub connectivity status to determine status for hub-connected devices”. Crystal clear what what really means, right? Well, I’m one of the saps that bought the Nvidia Shield ST Link that Samsung has abandoned. It’s at firmware version 020.00012. I assume this is why Alexa now thinks that every device is offline. Fantastic programming and QA.
It’s bad enough that these changes were pushed with little warning, and it’s bad enough that existing functionality is being removed, but surely ST knows who has these NVidia ST links. They could have sent out an email warning us that things were going to stop working.
I used to be a big fan of Samsung products, and I’m not willing to condemn the entire company for the actions of one product group but I’ve really lost confidence in ST. We’re all human but they have a lot of work to do to make this right. If I had the time I’d seriously consider migrating to a different platform, but I don’t, I just need things to work.
I’ve got a V3 hub sitting in a box so looks like I need migrate everything away from the abandoned Shield Link onto the V3 hub. But hey, that shouldn’t be a problem because we have a great migration utility, right?