I’m in the software engineering business and the release of this pair is obviously premature. Not only was no migration path created from the V1 hub to the V2 hub forcing existing customers to go through a tedious porting exercise but connecting existing devices is unreliable and key features like garage control are missing.
With visibility of Smartthings still primarily through recommendations from existing owners, this has made it difficult to recommend this product.
PLEASE try to preserve some semblance of backwards compatibility when the next upgrade arrives.
While I agree with the sentiment in general, not sure I agree directly. I’m glad its out now because I am using it right now, I am able to give feedback before they fully cook everything in ways that I might not like (dashboards, etc). I feel involved, and the system works for me.
I’ve said in other threads that maybe I’m unusual, but I’m not sure that I am. I have about 30 devices, a mix of web/zigbee/zwave, and it’s all working great.
Eaz, I agree. I received the new hub and was not able to add any device to it. I tried to roll back and now the old hub does not accept any device either. And:support is not responding (yes, I know they are nice and overworked, but that does not help me).
I can also testify that all of my devices are working perfectly with the new app and V2 hub. Maybe there are things that could have been looked at in more detail when it comes to the app. I am not sure how much research was done to determine the most heavily used apps.
In my honest opinion, there are small problems with the app. To work around those I use SmartRules. I have found many ways to replicate missing features.
Example: I have a virtual switch that I turn on when I arrive home. Then with smartRules I say if virtual switch is on, activate the zwave relay. The result is the garage opens.
Then I have a rule that says when garage contact sensor is closed, turn of virtual switch. (used to reset the switch so if the garage is open and my wife returns home, smartThings doesn’t close the garage door)
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
5
Ha… That’s funny. You think they’re going to take your feedback into account?
I wish the ST Marketing Management would have asked us if we wanted to be an “Early Alpha V2 Tester”. Normal early adopters get a product discount in exchange for time and anguish. ST could have provided critical two way dialogue each week prior to the upgrade with early adopters and included ST engineering and ST project management as to discuss the issues (Hardware, Software), loss of V1 features, lack of migration tools, effort required, etc.
I believe that most of the HUGE frustration from those of us complaining who took advantage of the “VIP V2 Customer Package” was that we “ASSumed” that we would have a stable platform with only a few issues, things that we expect with the end of a Beta phase, not Early Alpha.
Don’t get me started, but the total lack of timely response and support by the ST Help Desk or Migration Desk during this critical migration is unacceptable. I am not the only one stating this, but having an automated reply after 24 hours email is terrible.
I guess the ST Executives must think that we homeowners have no mission critical HA applications… but I totally disagree with that assessment of homeowners, especially with monitoring alarm systems, fire & water monitoring systems, perimeter doors & locks that are tied to objective events (presence, sunset, sunrise, etc)…
All in all, this was not well planned out, and ST had months and months to iron out these issues or plan for an upgrade with Alpha volunteers…
Clearly this was a rush to get something out the door, kinda of plan! Reminds me of this cartoon…
4 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
7
I’m unabashedly a “told you so” kinda guy. I don’t mean it in a bad way – my motivation is not smugness or satisfaction in other folk’s pain, but purely wanting to share the joy of my gift of my uncanny prescience.
(*A big portion of my professional career is risk prediction, analysis, and mitigation. I’m a professional pessimist and cynic. It’s a curse, though, because it’s hard to cheer folks up with my bummer attitude.)
In that respect, nobody on the Community Forum can say that I didn’t warn them. I posted many times in the “Hub V2 Impatient Begging” Topics that SmartThings and Customers would surely face significant challenges during the first weeks or months after Hub V2 was released into the wild. It was public knowledge that there would be no migration tool, and the signs that both Hub V2 and App V2 would be released concurrently was also of great concern to me.
I somehow didn’t make one of the most obvious predictions: The actual September 3rd release date: The date of the start of IFA Berlin, for which Samsung made the opening Keynote Presentation. Doh! SmartThings has said the date was only a coincidence. OK. Whatever. Still no excuse to release TWO major, major, major unrelated upgrades on the same date. Where’s the Risk Management in that strategy? Where is the resource management in that strategy? Both upgrades were bound to trigger confusion, bugs, and general assistance support requests – why double their workload unnecessarily?
Was SmartThings pressured by their parent, Samsung, to release earlier than advisable? I heard that end-customer by-invite-only Beta testing was roughly only 2 to 4 weeks – A little short for my risk tolerances. I’m not privy to how much testing was actually conducted – we can only judge by the quality of the results.
Regardless of the cause, “too soon releases” of gadgets and software are now the de facto way of conducting business, except for some very wise and risk averse companies. (That would not include Volkswagen apparently, BTW, geesh!). Just look at the popularity of Kickstarter and IndieGogo campaigns where thousands flock to completely unproven products and companies, most of which promise outrageous functionality and mysterious “discounts of of retail prices”, when they are not stores, and “retail price” is meaningless until a market is established for a product. Sigh.
Quality control issues are currently the expectation of SmartThings. @hagins acknowledges various hiccups, and has repeatedly promised that the company is moving to a fast-release cycle of much smaller incremental changes and that he believes this will reduce risk. I’m ambivalent – there’s logic in that concept, but there’s also a lot of logic in following a strategy of rigorous in-depth testing and informed patient Beta customer trials. But this latter method is really only practical if they follow a long major release cycle, instead of incremental.
Customers were banging on the door for Hub V2, plenty of them right here on the Community Forum where they could read all the warnings and details; yes – actual SmartThings employees literally recommended that people not jump into the first wave of Hub V2 upgrades, not just me.
SmartThings continues to make promises regarding the new platform. Migration tool is promised by the end of the year. On the Developer call, Hagins was promising feature roll-out in the November and early-2016 timeframes, and his own staff had to quickly disclaim those timelines and cautioned that “statements made by executives are non-binding” (yes – it was said jokingly, but who doesn’t believe it’s not the truth that there is a big gap between management’s goals and control of operations and the grunts who struggle to execute these plans?).
Please, SmartThings, prove me wrong. As everyone says here frequently, you’re giving your future competitors the opportunity to try to seize a possibly advantageous strategy: i.e., deliver quality when promised, every time. Dozens of people I speak with are holding their breath for Apple’s HomeKit with absolutely zero knowledge of that product. Why? Because of their faith in Apple’s quality and “it just works” reputation.
SmartThings has under 200,000 Customers at this time. So, frankly, they can still afford to alienate us all. I know that’s not their intent. I know everyone is working hard. I know the system is complex and brilliant and worth of much praise for it’s openness and more – But why do the mistakes keep piling up?
I know… Naive. They do seem to listen here more than any other company I work with.
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
9
They’re definitely listening which makes me feel rather stupid or mean or conflicted about writing my assessments, rather than uncontestably helpful posts.
Evidence seems to be, however, we’re often not heard. There are plenty of well thought out feedback and constructive discussions here, some even, humbly submitted by yours truly. But for whatever reason, important feedback does not make it into the product or operations.
App V2 “fixed” stuff that wasn’t broken, and broke other stuff that was working well… and that’s taking into account that SmartThings invited pre-release feedback on the design. When it’s 2 steps forward, 1 back, it stretches patience and makes this feel like a perpetual Beta. I guess it probably is.
I don’t know. Maybe I am more tolerant than most people, but I find ways around limitations. I’ve found the missing functionality can be fixed by being a little creative. I’m happy to be creative to make things work until smartThings catches up because my V2 performance has been quick and rock solid.
2 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
11
And that is honestly, perfectly wonderful! Early adopters, whether called Alpha, Beta, or RC1 are critical to a product’s evolution and market building. Thanks!
The shame is that some segment of Customers did not feel fully informed prior to Hub V2 purchase or installation, or didn’t postpone upgrade to the new mobile App.
I’m sorry, but coupling a sensor to the hub that most of the early adopters here already have is not a fair trade for a poor product upgrade. I hope it was pushed upon the original developers by Samsung rather than a questionable business decision.
As others have stated, I would have preferred to have been an alpha site and known that I was going to run into trouble rather that diving into trouble with a supposedly released product.
Shame on SmartThings…
(Note - by the time I registered for the upgrade, the bundle was already sold out)
To put a little positive spin on this, I do plan to keep my SmartThings system since it has been flexible enough to enable most of my more esoteric applications.
I’m just unhappy that this happened to such a promising company. You need to do it right to complete with the likes of Apple.
Yea… The bundle was sold out for me too, so I just bought the hub only for $99… Would have been nice to get a little extra for the massive amount of labor involved in researching exclude/include procedures, excluding all of my old devices, and including them into the new hub location.
@Carinda, I am truly glad that this “Customer Appreciation Bundle” worked for you and your V2 migration met your expectations. At least one person employed at SmartThings recognized that their installed base of loyal customers needed a token of appreciation for the time to upgrade.
Here is my personal point of view on the V2. Perhaps some homeowners V2 migration was not as complex or as long as some other homeowners that are repeatedly negatively responding with the same unpleasant experience as I encountered. There have been some migrations that were easier than others, and I am glad for those home owners. However:
Some long standing SmartThings owners have a large number of installed home automation devices, with complex integration of their own custom device types & SmartApps. Some Z-Wave devices required removing a switch and/or lock plate and ceiling fan hubs to access & push the hidden “Reset” button to re-join the V2 network. Several Z-Wave devices had to be forced excluded from the V1 network only to find out that the V2 hub had to be physically within 12" of that device to manually exclude them so they could be joined to the V2 network. This was certainly not explained in the migration instructions and/or expected given that the V2 hub had to be joined to a ethernet wire rather than be wireless connected.
The ST Support Desk was not available for ANY assistance via CHAT due to “unexpected volume of support tickets” and urgent requests to the V2 Migration Desk were not being returned for up to a day or longer, and sometimes with only an automated hyperlink back to the V2 upgrade document. IMHO, that document could have been shortened to “Remove everything in your V1 environment and start over as new, except for some of your devices and applications might not work as expected”.
Dedicated Smartthings open source developers are having to scramble to re-write their stable V1 code to accommodate unexpected quirks in the V2 environment. Then customers using these APPS are having to immediately re-add these new SmartApps versions into the slow responding IDE.
I could go on, but others have been doing this with their personal experiences.
Either way Smartthings would have been the bad guy. If they hadn’t released people would have been filling the community with posts about delays in releasing the new hub. I can tell you that I am building a house and I priced a system that can duplicate what I have here with ST. It was not pretty. I ended up somewhere around $15,000. And imagine if every time you wanted to make changes, you had to call someone to come to your house and do it. Is it probably more reliable than ST? The answer is probably yes. But I have learned a tremendous amount from this community and I think it’s worth understanding how all of this stuff works together. I knew there wasn’t much value to upgrading but I did it anyway. I’m fine with the issues. They will be worked out in time. I still remember surfing the web on dial-up and having a cell phone that didn’t get reception in most places that I tried to use it. Now both of those examples I used just work. It takes time guys. If I could build a better system myself then I may be a little less patient but as of now, I have no idea how to build a system like this.
with out this forum, i would have taken this v2 back to the store. i have managed thru my own searching/posting/head scratching figured out how to get about 80% of my devices back on line with the “new” limited app/v2 hub.
its a classic case of a large corporate buy out of an existing niche product and injecting there sigma 6 bull-ish into something that was working fine and provided a community of above average users the ability to tweak things as they see fit.
now version 2 is “better” by being more limited and half baked then rushed out the door.
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