I'd like to restrict responses to those who have owned a HE hub or been a Community member for less than 12 months. Older users are welcome to like posts.... Now that we have the ground rules that are highly likely to be broken....
What have our newest "inhubitants" found the most useful in their HE experience. What Apps or integrations or other elements of their HE experience have added the most value to their smart home?
While there are those, like me I will agree, that will consume a large proportion of the conversation, the floor is yours to make your points known...
I bought my first HE hub last Cyber Monday and made the gradual transition from ST to HE last December. I left ST because of the declining reliability of notifications, failure to handle DST changes properly and dependence on the cloud.
Most useful aspect of my HE experience:
1, breadth of official and community supported devices and integration.
2. the HE user community support via this forum
3. the many ways/options to accomplish what you want to do (e.g. Basic Rule, Rule Machine, SAR, etc)
Most frustrating aspect of my HE experience:
lack of native capability in HE to send email and text notifications. Must rely on community developed apps and cloud services. I do use the mobile Hubitat app but it is very basic and I am not confident that I can depend on it. I want multiple ways to send/receive notifications. I would gladly pay Hubitat a subscription fee IF the hub could natively send email and text notifications.
Hubitat did originally support SMS Text Notifications. Of course, Hubitat had to rely on a third party service to achieve this and the cost became prohibitive as the Hubitat user base grew. Hubitat made the decision to integrate Twilio as their official SMS notification solution. All SMS solutions rely on third party providers.
As the original author of the Pushover, and as a user of Pushover for over 4 years, I can say it has been incredibly reliable and robust.
Pushover is awesome - very reliable, and I like the fact you can customize the "level" of alert to be higher than other stuff on your phone/watch. It's a one-time fee, but absolutely well worth it.
Even if HE offered free native SMS/email/whatever again, I'd stick with Pushover -- I like it that much better than those other options.
The Hubitat mobile app and Pushover app are fine for those use cases where you have access to and some admin control of the intended message recipient device. But not useful when you don’t.
Also there is no stored history of push notifications, like email or text, especially on IOS devices. If you quickly or inadvertently dismiss a push notification, you are out of luck.
The Twilio service is quite obviously geared toward business marketing activities, not the average consumer. I could not find a simple, flat monthly fee subscription.
Granted any communication (push, email or text) is going to rely on some internet/cloud resources, but it is quite ironic that HE is praised and worshipped for its “local” operation/control but cannot send a basic email without using a community developed app, requiring an intricate setup process, dependent on third party cloud services!
Don’t misinterpret my criticism as being anti HE. I find the HE far superior to ST. I have made it do what I want. I just think Hubitat could make it much easier and therefore much more appealing to the average consumer.
I just recently (September '22) converted from SmartThings to Hubitat - my driving force being the upcoming loss of Groovy - and therefore, the use of webCoRE on SmartThngs. Almost all of my automations are under webCoRE and my 44 pistons. There was just too much available power and flexibility - along with a lot of planning, coordination, etc., embedded in webCoRE to not move to a platform that already supported it. I've been very pleased so far with almost everything about Hubitat.
The biggest change from SmartThings is, like others have mentioned, the inability of HE to send email and SMS notifications. Fortunately, with a little work, HE's Notifications is an acceptable workaround and webCoRE can handle emails, so overall, not a big deal.
Also, I continue to use webCoRE's presence capabilities as I find that HE's (like SmartThings') presence sensor capability and accuracy, are simply so inaccurate as to be unusable. While my webCoRE presence sensors have been completely reliable, HE often doesn't even know if I'm home or away 24 hours or more after the previous change. Conversely - and among other uses, I am able to use webCoRE's presence sensor to control my thermostat's heat/cool settings based on our phone's locations.
Other than those two things, everything else is better with Hubitat.
I’m able to see my push notification history in the most recent version of the Hubitat app on my iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 16.1 (although IIRC I could do the same on my iPhone 12 Pro with older versions of the app and iOS). It’s accessible from the Tools menu.
Is it really that ironic? As @ogiewon pointed out and you have acknowledged, any kind of notification to a device that’s not on your home LAN is 100% cloud-dependent.
I have found Pushover very simple to setup on a few mobile devices. I’m curious, what kinds of notifications do you need to send to devices you don’t have enough control over to install (or ask the primary user to install) Pushover on them? Or for very simple push notification needs, the Hubitat mobile app.
SmartThings? I don't remember. But since I use webCoRE for just about all of my automations, I'm using webCoRE email to send emails to my wife and me from several HE-based pistons - just as I did in SmartThings. Maybe I was just lumping webCoRE's email capability with SmartThings.
That's true, they did. I'm in the US so it was not as noticeable to me.
I interpreted @sburke781 topic title to mean “what can Hubitat do to make it easier for new consumers to setup and operate their new HE hub”
Can you do email and text notifications from HE? Yes, you can. I have done it. Was it quick and easy to do? NO.
All I’m saying is that this is one area that Hubitat could improve to make it easier for new users which could help overcome consumer resistance and increase the sale of HE hubs.
Yes, and that quantity is a user adjustable setting within the Pushover app on each phone/tablet as well. One can choose to keep "All Messages" if desired.
Although I joined two years ago, when researching which security system I should put in my house, I bought my Hubitat at last years Black Friday sale, so I've had it a bit less than a year. I had almost no prior experience with home automation with the exception of a 15 year old programmable remote and about a year with a security system that has a very limited automation component.
Wish the HE UI was more intuitive, with a lower learning curve. There is so much the HE can do, but often I just cannot figure out how to do it.
I remain shocked and incredulous that the HE is seen as a hub only for controlling zigbee/zwave devices, and not as a hub for viewing the data those zwave/zigbee devices collect, and that HE thus has no native graphing ability. I've read all the pro/con discussions, and don't want to start one here, but suffice it to say the lack of basic data graphing integral to HE just stuns me. Clearly the device can do it as evidenced by some 3rd party apps.
The discussion above regarding getting notices - I too was once trying to figure it out - but just figuring it out was complicated so I gave up before I started. It is one of those would be nice things vs a more core operation (ie porch lights on/off, etc). Same thing with installing this WebCore thing - gave up. It would be nice if the device did more out of the box.
The community here is awesome and helpful. I really appreciate that
Before I bought the HE, I sort of thought the HE could connect to almost anything, and in some ways, it can. What I did not realize is that many of those apps are from volunteer developers, who may then abandon their apps when they no longer have a need for the app. I am so grateful to the people who have the skills and willingness to create and share these HE apps, but also constantly concerned that one of the apps on which I rely might break. I wish HE would officially support apps that get abandoned.
The apps I have found most useful include:
Integration to Abode Alarm
Lock code Manager
Hubigraph for graphs on dashboards
Bond Bridge for sending commands to motorized Blinds
Samsung TV app (facilitates turning off TV to trigger other things!)
