Viability of using SmartThings in multiple household buildings

Jonathan,

I’m so sorry… After re-reading my post I understand why it might have came across as attacking but that was not my intention and I do apologize. I typically do not post on forum because it is so easily misunderstand what someones intentions are.

Your right… It’s not rocket science… to us. However, it will be to a lot of your tenants. For example, I’m an IT consultant. I manage roughly 3000 end users and their devices (computers, phones, printers, etc…) Most of them do not know the difference between an address bar or search bar. Sigh you can imagine my frustrations when I say go to this website.

I like your idea and if I was a tenant there I would love it. The bad idea part was how are you going to manage such a thing. Trying to manage 300 devices seems like a nightmare. I could not manage the number of devices I currently support if it wasn’t for the software we use to push updates, schedule backups, install software and run A/V. It would be impossible. If you had a central server that all the hubs connected to where you could push apps and policies it would be perfect but as far as I know ST does not make such a thing.

My guess is when you configuring your 100th hub or when you have those 10 tenants who always are having issues you will think back to this post and say, Yep… I get it.

Anyway, just my two cents. I didn’t intend on offending you and I just wanted to save you the headache that I have experienced in my own projects/deployments.

You can ignore my entire post if you like but if nothing else please accept my apology.

  • Josh
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SmartThings will always have an opportunity to support commercial or reseller markets and that would significantly reduce risk and improve viability of this type of Project.

Whether they want to enter that channel is a big question… Not to mention whether or not it would be strategic to do so until the platform is more stable.

There are a lot of connected products targeted to the commercial property management business (particularly hotels). The cost is surely higher, but the better results may be worth it.

Good points that you bring up. I’ve always had the ability to remove users via the app. Swiping right on the users name reveals a “Remove User” button. I’m going to assume that this not working is because of the current issues with the multiple users that they’re working on fixing?

As for the force logging out, I have to think that will be something that will be fixed. At least I hope…that’s a huge security flaw if that’s not done. There’s always the fallback to support that can do a force log out if a phone is lost. We’re going to recommend that our residents place lock codes/screens on their phones anyway.

No worries man, no offense taken. I’m in IT myself so I completely understand the support aspect and the concerns. It’s going to be something we’ll work through and grow with experience.

We know… and SmartThings has been aware of the problem for many months. For a company with a high “Security Audit” rating, this flaw is a rather incredible oversight. I’m certain it will be fixed … eventually.

What’s even worse, IMHO, is that the average consumer is NOT informed of this risk. Most Customers do not realize that a stolen phone or temporarily shared login permanently gives the recipient access to their home unless the contact support. Customers are not warned of this risk so they can self-mitigate (i.e, always use a screen lock, remote wipe, and definitely contact support to revoke credentials when a device has been lost; it is insufficient to do the just the “obvious and customary practice” and just change your password using another device or the graph.api web page).

Looks like the ability to remove users was lost when the ability to add them was, it was there previously, at least in some versions of the mobile app.

The password change issue not causing a force logout appears to have always been there.

But of course we don’t know what will come back with the new functionality.

I think they’ll surprise us. I mean…something has to justify the amount of time it’s taken to get the functionality back. I’m sure they understood the shortcomings of the functionality in its entirety.

I agree with this part.

Just sayin’… :wink:

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Right. That’s probably something everyone can all agree on, including SmartThings. The communication on major items should be improved. Especially for the Devs and those that try to take SmartThings to its limits.

Lets hope they learn from their mistakes, even though they were acquired by Samsung they’re still a rather new company that has a lot to learn.

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I am also using multiple (x12) SmartThings hubs to monitor a dozen flats dispersed in a 3 buildings residence.
Contrary to you, and being a strong believer in Murphy’s law (I am a computer engineer, that’s why ! :wink: ), I first experimented on 2x V1 hubs before going to 6x, then 12x.
All hubs are within the same ST Location, and each supports 1-4 Z-wave Devices.
Contrary to you, I only use my ST hubs (with Fibaro FGK-101 Temperature Sensors) to PASSIVELY monitor the temperatures within those flats (and consequently adjust MANUALLY the central heating).

I spent close to 3 months setting up my system; at that point in time, my experience is mixed :

  • it does work… most of the time (95% ?)
  • there are way too many instabilities, and most of the time, even after deep “post-mortem analysis”, one does not know where it comes from : some hardware glitch in a hub, Z-wave device, Internet connection, ST Cloud, my own custom Device Handler and SmartApps, etc…
  • the worse unpredictable instabilities come from the ST cloud, which regularly (at least once a month) breaks down, and hangs up my SmartApps… which I have then to restart manually… after I have detected the problem.

I tried to mitigate those instabilities going into “defensive programming”, with limited success : for instance, one of my periodic SmartApp would “die” (or hang-up) at random times. So I created a 2nd “watchdog” SmartApp which would periodically monitor the 1st one and check it was still alive.
And guess what : the 2nd watchdog SmartApp dies/hangs-up even more frequently that the one it is supposed to monitor…

My current limited conclusions are :

  • the current stability of the ST platform is completely insufficient to support “mission critical” HA. More specifically, I would NEVER use it for anything related to secure access (or sprinklers activation !!), not even mentioning health monitoring (likely forbidden in ST license);
  • this stability improves sooooo slooooooly that you wonder if it will reach 99,99% reliability in 5-10 years, as it should be for any kind of mission critical task; and sometimes (the iOS mobile ST Dashboard), the instability INCREASES with newer releases;
  • the more “advanced / atypical” your usage is, the more glitches you will suffer : multiple hubs per location is barely supported, multiple locations with single administrator has no automated support, etc…
  • access rights management (system administrator, local administrator, passive end-user, etc…) is currently a science fiction concept within ST, so be prepared to do most things “manually”. But for 300 hubs, is that really an option ?
  • AFAIK, given my goals and constraints, ST is yet the “less bad” solution on the market.

I know it does not help and it is probably not what you want to hear, but unless you manage to become a “strategic partner” for ST (if such a thing exists) and get a direct priority access to their development team, I would advise you to get a refund for your 300 hubs, unless you want to get into lots of pain for the next 5 years, and get very angry tenants which will never understand nor accept all the recurring “glitches” after the first 2 weeks.
Sad but true…

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