The problem is you are not comparing apples to apples. SmartThings is a company that sold a product indicating certain capabilities. They presumably want you and others to purchase and support their business in the future. What did the community developer that contributed a smartapp or device handler get from you or promise you? I like SmartThings as much as the next guy but you cannot possibly compare the expectations you have from SmartThings to the expectations (if any) that you have of a community developer.
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Sorry thatâs another ridiculous topic. First of all, I didnât create the business model, nor can I change it.
Secondly, I put a lot more than $100 in it, and is not unreasonable expectation to have it perform as advertised.
Lastly, you are missing the point of what the developers are complaining about. I cannot fault you for that, because you are new around here. SmartThings Community used to be a place for developers to share ideas on how to use the platform in ways to achieve smart automation.
Since the v2 launch that has changed. We all know that SmartThings is dealing with growing pains and we hope that they will be able to stabilize sooner or later. We are tired of people flooding the community with complains about SHM not working, routines not firing and modes not changing. We have been patient enough for SmartThings to âright the shipâ BUT we would get on board to wait even more, if at least some of our elite developers are kept abreast of the upcoming changes. It was very disappointing to see Bruce being ignored when obviously his work was much appreciated. Thatâs allâŠ
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SmartThings is STILL a Community place for developers to share ideas. Itâs still going on in the communityâŠeven if the top threads are whining and complaining right now. Scroll down a little in the list.
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Not for long, my friend, not for long! This community is no longer for developers, it is a never ending whining fest about insignificant reasons, and the real reasons are being ignored or lost in the sea of nothingness. Long live the Slack Channel!
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This is a very elitist mentality.
I agree with maintaining, but not with complete withdrawal. Please consider end users; transfer shepherdship of the code to another willing developer. Or at least change the licensing so that we can modify/share/improve upon it.
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I can only speak for my self as a developer. We have available to us various code samples and documentation that we can study in an effort to write something.
I take these things, and attempt to spin up something to meet an unmet need that I have in my home.
For me this is a hobby, I enjoy the challenge of solving a problem and building something out of nothing and that can add value to the home and the family.
What drives me to share code with the community is more to satisfy personal egotistical requirements than anything else. Bragging rights as it were, community acknowledgment ect. There certainly isnât any money in it, and even it there were, it would be small and not a motivational factor for me.
The frustrating aspects to this enter when specific things that are documented, and used to work no longer work. The resolution paths are very limited, the scope of the issue can be large or small, the larger issues tend to get remediated at some point, but we donât know when, developers donât get much more detail than what gets announced and posted.
The smaller issues, well they just usually dwindle off into the sunset.
The developer has two choices when his formally working app is now broken or hobbled, code around it, or crap can it, but this choice is completely up to the developer, there is no contract in truth or implied with the community or ST.
Developers donât owe the community anything, nor does ST owe anything to the developers.
There comes a point in this process when itâs difficult not to be upset, and complain publicly regarding issue xyz, the complaints are to an extend indicative of the passion involved, and the developers commitment to ST. No developer wants to leave, but everyoneâs got their limits on how much can be toleratedâŠ
When a community looses a resource, does it hurt the community?, well sureâŠ
But what about the developer?, what about his hobbled app, what about his reputation now being potential tarnished by things that are beyond his control?
The average Joe, doesnât know the reason some app doesnât work⊠The developers do, and we shouldnât be shunted for letting the community know about these issues, otherwise we look at faultâŠ
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The failure of the ST platform and staff to maintain the databases without introducing corruption â all the while blaming apps such as Rule Machine is, and should be, top of the list of discussions. Call it whining if you like, itâs more than justified. A system and a support staff that cannot even refrain from corrupting itâs own data needs to be complained about - and needs to be fixed quickly and not ignored. This has been going on for way too long. Attempting to shift blame away from themselves and toward stellar community developers (whoâve been pointing out the issue(s) for a long time) is maddening.
With that as a history, this community wonât be a place to share ideas for much longer unless ST gets the stability issues fixed, becomes more transparent and recognizes the strength and skills that the developer community provides to their product.
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People, please. No need for personal attacks or anything like that. Fighting between each other wonât help ST, the community or even yourself. I suggest, if youâre not the ânegativeâ type, just donât go into the negative threads. There are plenty of other threads being created daily, where other uses still need help.
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As a fairly intelligent end user,at least Iâd like to think, I donât think private app developers owe me anything but I definitely feel that a product purchased from a major company does. It should work the vast majority of the time and with my limited experience with ST and with my simple system it mostly has but from what Iâve read out here I can understand the frustration of some developers trying to make it a better more capable system. ST needs to prioritize reliability , innovation is great and solving problems is fun , I get it, but if HA is really going to take off the average consumer expects it to work otherwise the market will be limited to those who like to use it as a hobby.
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Here is a great example of what the community expects!
I own a Hue Hub and I donât pay a monthly fee. So I think holding ST to the same standards is not unfair. So, letâs dissect this announcement a little, shall we?
it contains a reasonable deadline
is a week in advance
it clearly states the changes that will be made
it explains why the changes are needed
it sets expectations of what is yet to come
I could go on and onâŠBut you get the point, I am sureâŠ
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I spent hundred of dollars in ST few months back because it advertised itself as security, monitoring and automation system. Never planned to treat it as a hobby. Mid February to mid march for ST is almost not useable, I must say it has improved a lot since then.
Just to be clear, Iâve spent a couple thousand on my system. Not just $100 for the hub. I spent that based on the promises of ST. The hub itself is worthless without at least another $50 invested in a device to go along with it.
It was working fine but that was before December it seems.
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As many in this thread have pointed out, you donât seem to understand the role of community developers and the software they develop. First of all, I never said I was packing up shop (there are over 20 SmartApps and Device Handlers in my public Github). I withdrew Rule Machine from distribution in the Community for totally valid reasons, well documented in this thread and elsewhere. No users of Rule Machine have been hurt by this. Every single user of Rule Machine is free to continue to use Rule Machine, and my decision and actions do not impact that. The only âusersâ who are affected by this are people who have never used Rule Machine at all, as now it is not available to them.
About withdrawing the source code: There is no other mechanism at my disposal to control access to my own software. Your inferred solution is that I should continue to make Rule Machine available ad infinitum under any circumstances. As if, once Iâve offered something free to the community, Iâm obligated to continue to offer it in perpetuity. I have no obligations to anyone in that regard, and I think you are mistaken to suggest otherwise. As for âpulling support temporarilyâ: you are too new to realize that âtemporarilyâ may well mean forever, as ST has failed continuously for two years to provide a stable functioning platform. Donât hold your breath.
SmartThings seriously broke their own platform about a month ago. It was already broken in many ways, but one month ago they pushed a build that had a devastating impact on the reliability of the platform. As a direct consequence, Rule Machine started suffering random corruption, resulting is broken zombie rules that would continue to do things. At any moment, some part of the automations that users had constructed with great care would simply cease to function correctly. This failure was reported the day it occurred, and daily since by numerous people. While it would be easy to blame Rule Machine (as some here have done, writing ignorantly about the use of state variables), the failure has nothing to do with Rule Machine per se. Rule Machine is widely used, many people have dozens of rules; platform failures show up in RM due to this widespread use.
So here I am, with 90% of the questions being asked of me being about the platform failure, with Support pointing fingers at Rule Machine, while the company itself has been SILENT and OPAQUE about the platform problems. I am not the source of the problem, nor the solution to the problem: I am totally helpless in the face of this. What would you have me do? Volunteer to be the tar-baby for STâs failings? No thanks. By withdrawing RM a certain focus has now been brought to bear on these platform problems that had not been there before, top to bottom in the company.
No good deed goes unpunished. Thanks for being so understanding.
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What personal attacks are you speaking about?
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Bruce,
IMHO- you owe no one an explanation. Many of us completely âget itâ. We will forever be grateful for all of your hard work and dedication to this community. Many, many thank youâs good sir. 
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Indeed, if it werenât for SmartTiles, I would have STCanned ST months earlier. SmartThings would have been far too tedious to use day to day without it.
Now I have a product that has something frankly better than SmartTiles already built in.
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Totally. I had the same experience with Pollster, which I wrote as a work-around for SmartThingsâ broken polling engine and which SmartThings support attempted to blame for all kinds of platform issues. Curiously, they continued recommending using Pollster as a solution at the same time.
And this is pure consumerist mentality. Developers own their work and are free to chose whatever license terms they feel appropriate. Why donât you ask SmartThings to open-source their firmware and cloud platform, so we could modify and improve it? Itâs exactly because of this kind of attitude I stopped sharing my code.
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It probably doesnât help that my name now is attached to âMarketingâ, but I have absolute pride in our community, since I joined SmartThings as someone who were to help voice community concerns internally, and communicate back externally⊠That saidâŠ
I get why Bruce and other developer community members do what they did. I have my deepest admiration towards @bravenel, Alex, @geko, and all other contributors whoâve done so much for the community. Whether they decide to continue to contribute on a solution theyâve created, or not, is solely up to them, and we can only thank them for sharing their work with us when they did.
As a non-developer, Iâm happy to see our company initiatives focus on platform stability, especially since, despite how great and amazing apps and solutions we can share in the community- if the foundation isnât ideal, then it also affects the quality of great solutions like âRule Machine.â
In my year here at ST, Iâve seen so much change, but ultimately, it really doesnât matter what we say, unless our actions can back us up. I really truly hope, that these same amazing developers will one day feel confident to build on this platform again. I also really hope we can foster a better environment in which we can allow developers maintain their apps easier, or provide version controls, tools, and continual communication of changes- allowing their apps to ânot breakâ, with every release we do.
In the mean time, developers like @bravenel, thanks for sharing such an awesome app like RM, which personally made my home-setup better.
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Well hopefully you purchased items that could be transferred to another system. Iâve racked up the costs of equipment too and Iâm totally cheap. Thatâs why I made sure if I needed to pull the eject chord I could and take my crap and go.
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problem I have is Iâm part z-wave and part zigbee. Itâs my understanding that any other hub forces me to go one or the other. But I havenât done the research. Just hearsay on these forums.