There’s evidence to the contrary. Please refer to this article, for example (there’re several others that imply the same):
The way to do more is to do less, and put a human face on it. To build the platform for everyone, Smartthings built a platform for someone. The target first customer of Smartthings owned a second home. People like Alex Hawkinson and his ski-cabin neighbors. They needed a way for their ski cabins to monitor their vital signs and to call for help if they got sick.
I.e. the primary use case for SmartThings was to monitor your ski cabin while you’re not there. There’s no need to control anything when you don’t live there, is there?
There’s also a circumstantial evidence. Original SmartThings implementation missed a few key features that are a must for any home automation platform, specifically the Scenes and the Rules engine. The so called “routines” (formerly known as “Hello Home” actions) were added more than a year after SmartThings was released and still do not qualify to be called Scenes. As for the Rules, they don’t have a generic Rules engine to this day.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
22
When SmartThings distributed to their Kickstarter Backers in San Francisco (i.e., pretty darn early in their history 3+ years ago?) they demoed a remote controlled crock pot that also Tweeted, and an remote controlled automated pet feeder.
It was heavily emphasized that the power of the platform was the Groovy based DTH and SmartApp development environment, and that the latter would be an opportunity for developers to monetize their skills and creativity with a Marketplace to be provided by the company.
Automation (whether for notifications or control or both… ie, shut off water valve when leak detected) was always a key feature. A complex rule engine wouldn’t be required because the eventual rise of “20,000” developers () would create narrow use case super easy to use parameter driven SmartApps to cover any conceivable scenario. From lighting control to alarms to cooking to dog feeding…
The control function of SmartThings has always taken second seat to monitoring and “automation” by the own admission of ST founders. The problem is that their idea of automation by writing “apps” instead of traditional and time-proven Scene & Rule method has been a total disaster. Sure, it gives a lot of power to few developers who are able and willing to spend their time writing Grovy code, but it leaves the majority of the customers powerless and at the mercy of developers’ whim, as evidenced by the Rule Machine debacle.
And as far as an army of “20,000 developers”, we know all too well that this number is inflated, to put it mildly. The fact is, that even 3 years after its introduction, SmartThings does not have a functioning developer program or an app store to speak of and the app approval literally takes years. Personally, I cannot describe it anything other than a massive failure.
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tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
24
You do realize I was being facetious, right? That 10,000 or 20,000 has been a BS number since the first time it was spoken. Max attendance on Dev Calls has been 50 or so; lots of much more realistic numbers out there to indicate the lack of developer interest, including the small number of published SmartApps, notwithstanding the “backlog” due to the willful insufficient allocation of resources to Developer Support and Publication.
) would create narrow use case super easy to use parameter driven SmartApps to cover any conceivable scenario. From lighting control to alarms to cooking to dog feeding…