[WITHDRAWN] Community Admiration

Nest hasn’t had issues to the level of SmartThings. (Colloquially, ST was so bad here that I bought a v2 because of the promise that the apps will run locally even when the servers were down. As pointed out basically everywhere, and proven very strongly after my changeover in November, that is 99% false.)

How’s that working out these days? And more to the point, how can the community step up and fix issues such as the state corruption that prompted this whole mess?

If, by now, they don’t have full-coverage API testing in place then basically nothing will help them. Their current testing flat isn’t working. Without large-scale real-world testing, by both app devs and power/bleeding-edge users, nothing will change. (Actually… lets rephrase that in light of the rest of this thread. Nothing has changed. Releases still break tons of apps. Infrastructure “upgrades” are hit or miss, mostly miss. On a regular basis, bog standard official-app functions like “push button on phone, receive light in room” involve crossing fingers and hoping.)

Somewhat unrelated, but I just looked to see when I switched from VeraLite. I got my ST v1 hub in May of last year. I lost some features right out of the box (delays, ecobee support, complex scheduling, etc) but “that is OK, Samsung is less risky than a tiny hole-in-the-wall company!” Of course, it was so unreliable (or dependent on unreliable infrastructure) that I bought a v2 in November. “V1 was a mistake, I should have waited for the one that does basic functions autonomously like the old controller did.” If anything, since then it has been worse. All the CEO/marketing/“outreach” handwaving about improvements is good, but not particularly useful when my lights won’t turn on and my coffee won’t brew.

I don’t necessarily agree/disagree with most of what you said with exception to this statement:

I believe there were, and probably still are a number of community members who were literally programming around it.

Just sayin’

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From who’s perspective? Yours?

Nest Thermostats have destroyed ‘HVAC’ boards, Nest Thermostats have had really bad WiFi issues, Nest Protects Gen 1 should have never have been released to the general population…

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Gen2 Nest Thermostat but by no means hasn’t it even been a remotely smooth ride, more on par with ST issues, YMMV.

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That is different from fixing them. I can “program around” the switch not working by trying again, then refreshing, then trying a third time, etc but that doesn’t make it fixed. That just means that sometimes it might recover.

I’d like to see one person who was able to do that!

Obviously not all of it, but some apps that used state. Here is one example:

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Missed that one completely…

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Damn.

Do we have to be so negative? If we don’t like it, perhaps we should just move on so the rest of us can be blissfully positive about things that may not be that way in reality.

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Too late!..been here for years!

…okay, so only since 2014…but that didn’t sound as cool :wink:

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You’re really running out of ammo aren’t you :smile:

The Android 2.1.2 is out the update 14.38 is out there are other subjects to cheer about instead of Nest products, imho

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NEVER. you’ve given me a life time’s supply.

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Well in that case, you’re welcome :wink:

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I wouldn’t say programmed around so much as built in redundancy to ensure operation. I’ve done that… A lot.

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I think you’ve pretty much missed the point or ignored the context of my response to your statement…

No but as I said it’s a much simpler system, relative to complexity there are a lot of issues that have got past their QA.

Your statement was about Samsung helping solve issues with consumer developed apps, state corruption has zero to do with coding of community developed apps, this relates to Samsung code, which is what I am saying should be their focus not helping some amateur to code simple smart apps…

And how’s community support working out? Very well if you take a look at the forums, a couple of people taking a break from developing their own apps, hasn’t stopped by the rest of the community still helping other people write apps, there are plenty of helpful people still here, me included!

I do however agree with your point about the V2 being over promised with the local running and very much under delivering, although part of me thinks that perhaps the plan was to move more off the cloud but it’s own success caused the cloud servers to fail and they have been trying to recover ever since, also I expect that they didn’t understand some of the complexities of moving the existing code base to a local architecture with cloud integration and also the migration activity this would involve without trying to lose service (ironically)

Me too and in fact there are smart apps just to develop redundancy, but this then puts more load on the servers, and then you need to add more redundancy, viscous loop until the point at which the servers fall over… and here we are :slight_smile:

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I did that too. for a while, … but that is just putting bandaids, not a solution.

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I’m actually working with a couple of folks in that area, because of a persistent problem with Nest Protects and Google’s OnHub.

The biggest concern about Nest is it hasn’t brought in expected profits. And Google is infamous for just dropping tech and software when it feels it’s not in the company’s best interest. Or I should be saying, Alphabet.

And Google still hasn’t delivered anything remotely smart home with OnHub yet.

Amazon isn’t interested in managing the devices, when it can do well providing an audio input for the devices. That’s a world of difference.

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I suspect the claim about HVAC equipment being destroyed by Nest thermostats is highly overstated.

And the Nest Protect hand-waving problem was solved with the second generation.

Other than issues I have with Protect and OnHub, now tracked to being an OnHub problem, my Nest products have been relatively trouble-free. Other than one really bad day, when we all lost our thermostats.

I think Philips Hue is about the only company that doesn’t seem to have problems in the smart home market.

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Soooo other than all the problems they’ve had they’re great?

My comment wasn’t to bash Nest or praise ST, a statement was being made that Nest hasn’t had issues to the level of ST which is wrong and all I was trying to clarify. BOTH companies have had some pretty bad issues.

Which is worse is entirely subjective, I’ve actually had a pretty good experience with my Gen2 Nest Thermostat, I briefly started experiencing the WiFi bugs but no where near as bad as others had and my issues were resolved quickly after. That and only one Nest cloud outage is all I have experienced so (and this will come as a shock to some because they want to believe whatever helps their argument) my Nest experience has been better than my ST experience overall.

But then my ST experience has been better than most with less issues than others although still not without fault and I agree with you on the Philips Hue Bridge, the only time I was even close to experiencing issues with them was when they decided they were going to block non-Philips products on their hub but then quickly reversed their decision, other than that (which I didn’t get hit with anyway) I’ve never had a single issue with my Hue Bridge.