Weekly Update from Alex - 4/22/16

Announcements
1

As I promised in my big post last week, for the foreseeable future I will be sharing a weekly update on the progress we have made towards creating the best possible platform and products for you. In the near term, I’m going to keep this focused on the tangible progress made during the past week.

Platform updates
We pushed a few updates to the platform this week which were largely targeted at reliability of the platform. We have improved Rooms stability in the mobile app, made improvements to Smart Home Monitor Arm/Disarm, made more cassandra database improvements, improved the consistency of state variables, and many more meaningful fixes. In some of these cases, we’re laying the groundwork for larger improvements so you may not yet “feel them” in your everyday experience.

Hub Firmware
Our latest hub firmware update also had a lot of improvements that will add to overall reliability of device control and local execution. We fixed a bug where local executing SmartApps would create two sunrise/sunset events, made significant improvements to ZigBee, and improved LAN connected device communication overall.

UI/UX Improvements
Over the last couple of months we have been doing a lot of market research and user feedback testing on the user experience of the SmartThings mobile app. We got a lot of really great feedback and used that to make some UI/UX improvements to the Android mobile app. We are excited we can finally share these with you and the iOS update will follow soon. Lots more to do but we hope you see this week’s Android release as a step forward.

I also want to thank every single community member for the passion you bring to this community. We know we have a long ways to go to achieve our vision for you and are working around the clock, but when we see posts like this, it really helps motivate the team even more. Thank you!

Finally, we’re looking forward to seeing and interacting with many of you at the Samsung Developer Conference next week. If you’re in the San Francisco area, come see us there. If you’re not, you will be able to check it out online and we’ll include key updates here of course.

Let’s keep the dialogue flowing and I’ll look forward to updating you again next week!

-Alex

36 Likes
3

@alex thank you. Kudos to your team staying focused in all of the anger. Justified for those that are affected. I hope they see the improvements that I have seen as well as others.

3 Likes
4

Appreciate the concerted and determined effort as well as the updates.

Unless I have something else going on, I’m not so sure the two sunrise/sunset events issue is fixed. I’ve done a zwave repair and removed and re-added my zwave light and still got two sunset events tonight.

750×1334 108 KB

5

You may need to remove and re-add the automation.

6

Will the IOS update fix the multi attribute tiles broken in the last update? I hope so as all my power reading devices no longer show the watts being used. I have to go into recently to see the watts. If it isn’t on the list of fixes please add it. Thanks.

7

What could be the cause of my smartthings routines “good morning” for instance firing when the rule clearly states Monday - Friday only?

8

I believe that the routine will always fire but no actions will be taken if a restriction is in place.

1 Like
9

Thanks for the update. Can you, perhaps, lock down this thread so that it, too, doesn’t turn into another i’ve-got-this-problem-and-why-haven’t-you-fixed-it-yet-you-clods fest? Getting pretty tired of combing through those to find useful information…

10

just click the mute thread button, then it doesn’t affect you…

11

Had a frustrating weekend trying to add Hue Phoenix lights. Apparently these used to be easy to add but are no longer supported.

Please can you look at support for these lights as they are part of the Hue range and its misleading to suggest compatibility with Hue when the whole hue range is not supported.

ST Support said I need to develop a custom device handler but unfortunately that is beyond my abilities.

I have added a review on amazon warning people against the phoenix lights until they are supported.

12

Are SHM and Smart Lights still the only SmartApps that run locally?

13

Alex, thank you for the update. Coming from Lowes Iris and being constantly kept in the dark, I appreciate the value of your communications. Are there any changes/improvements in store for SHM and the dashboard? About the only thing I miss from Iris is the comprehensive dashboard showing various components of the system (i.e. who’s home, how many lights/switches are on, doors open, etc)

As a coder, if we could create our own apps for the dashboard I would create my own. Any chance of getting improvements to SHM or the ability to create our own dashboard apps soon?

1 Like
14

dude, you should check out SmartTiles… you can setup multiple web based “dashboards”. I have a control board (which allows changing states of things) and a monitoring board (which reports temps, humidity, open/close, etc). SmartThing’s best, imo, marketing point is the community support (hence the recent stability updates :)). SmartTiles gives you the ability to have a perm. mounted tablet/smartphone on premises to control the things… i haven’t made such an investment… but it could be cool!

2 Likes
15

Thanks for this. I look forward to the regular updates.

Is there any plan to get better ide functions in the uk. Like hit intergrale in and a working simulator? Would help the uk market a lot.

16

I removed and re-added it. Last night, the sunset automation showed as running twice and the turn off at 11pm automation didn’t run. So, no go there.

I’ve removed and re-added the device and automations multiple times since the fix, but this still isn’t working.

@slagle - is there some more detailed debugging I can do to help your team figure out what’s causing this issue?

@chickwebb - I honestly don’t want to turn this into a complaint thread, but when an announcement about a platform update includes a bug fix and I am not seeing that bug fixed, I think it’s helpful to the community in case that’s affecting anyone else. If there’s a more appropriate place to discuss this, I’m open to doing it there.

17

There is an option to reply as new topic…

1 Like
18

Thank you for the updates - keep them coming, please.

Meanwhile, IMHO, the single biggest thing you could do to improve customer satisfaction would be to fully support Rule Manager - it’s the only application on ST that would get me to recommend ST to anyone. Without it, I cannot not recommend ST to a friend.

4 Likes
19

Thank you for the suggesting. I intend to, but there’s still no substitute for a comprehensive dashboard.

20

What would need to be included for a dashboard to be “comprehensive”? SmartTiles is building a feature wishlist…

2 Likes
21

Our support team can help with this. One of the things I’d like them to check is if you are in fact on the latest firmware.