SmartThings: The End is Near

The old Groovy integration will definitely end. I assumed you had migrated the remote already to Edge vs something on Hubitat. [EDGE DEVICE] Simple Harmony Bridge **Alpha Testing** - Community Created Device Types - SmartThings Community

Correct, once ST shuts down the Groovy platform, the old official Logitech Harmony Hub integration with ST will end. Once that happens, the only way to use the Home Control buttons on a Harmony Hub Remote Control will be to use one of the other official integrations with Logitech, like Hue, Lutron, or Roku.

The “hack” used by my Hubitat integration for the Harmony Hub, relies on the use of virtual devices on the SmartThings platform, using the old ST-Harmony integration.

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Ah ok. Understood. Bigger problem then for Harmony…

I punted in my home theater by tossing a minimote into the room to control lights. I also have an echo dot in there for voice control. But we rarely use either since the automation rule that dims lights and turns on floor LED’s when the “watch TV” activity is used gets the job done. The wall GE embrighten switch has a double tap rule to shut every thing on or off too just for kicks.

As for ST, I keep mine plugged with my Hue lights active only just for nostalgia reasons. I had unplugged it but later plugged it back in - no idea why. Might be fun tinkering with their new API one day.

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Are you aware of anything able to go the opposite direction? My TV's sound bar is apparently only supported in SmartThings, and I'd love to mirror it to Hubitat.

That said, the automation that uses it is currently just running in SmartThings, and will hopefully survive the change.

Gave up on ST almost five years ago after I got my C3 hub setup (can’t believe it’s been that long already). Haven’t regretted it for a moment since.

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I am just so glad I did a little research and found this forum about 2 years ago. Read some posts of people recommending switches to use and started out straight away with Hubitat! I don't think I really even looked into ST at all, it never really came up in my searching.

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HubiThings Replica can. It's robust, fast, and flexible and additional Replica Drivers are being built by the developer. (Individuals within the community at large are also welcome to create and contribute specialty drivers.) There is a particular focus right now to build more Replica Drivers for Samsung devices, and I expect we'll see those start to appear shortly after the holidays.

Feel free to post in the thread linked above or PM me directly to discuss the brand, model or capabilities of your soundbar and we'll take a look at what can be done to get you going.

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I managed to get around 40 Smart Devices (including some Tuya/Cloud) and 20 Webcore Pistons ported over in around 24 hours.

The only thing that I can't get working is Sonos integration. I have playlists that play when I wake up or if I have trouble sleeping.

SmartThings was great with Sonos. You add any song, album, artist or playlist as a "favourite" in the Sonos app. Then call playPreset(n) from Piston/Rule to play the n-th favourite. It is easy, it works, its agnostic to the music source (Apple, spotify etc). Unfortunately, Hubitat requires me to find a URI to pass to playTrack(). I've not been able to find the URI's I need for Apple music.

Its disappointing that Sonos integration is provided by Hubitat as a built-in app yet it so poor - they seem to have spent 99% of development effort on Voice synthesis on Sonos. I've still not got a solution for playing music on my Sonos via Hubitat.

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I've been a Smartthings user for the past 4 years and with all of the changes coming it was starting to break my custom automations and in general was flaky at times and slow. I just got a Hubitat Hub for Christmas and spend a chunk of the day yesterday moving devices over and setting up rules in Hubitat.

I had a lot of issue getting my Konnected system moved over as I had to do a complete wipe of the device to get it to work but generally things moved over fine. Setting up the automations/rules in Hubitat has been great and I was able to get most things back the way I want them with little issue. Overall Hubitat has been great and the automations are so much faster now.

I do have a WiFi Meross switch and a Wifi U-Bolt lock that don't have Hubitat support and my Arlo cameras have to be triggered through IFTT now as there is no native connection but all my Z-wave and Zigbee devices are working great.

Glad I made the switch

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I moved from ST to HE in September. It took a few days to move my devices and pistons but I'm really glad I did. It just works and I don't have to worry about Samsung's seemingly ever-changing migration dates or a lack of clear, concise information from Samsung.

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Wow it has gotten really ugly in ST land. Just a sampling here:

Samsung people have given up even responding to this thread for the last 30+ days, but looks like they conceded and pushed out Groovy turn-off date by a quarter.

If she's not a bot, I think poor @nayelyz must be one of the most patient and hard working people on earth:

image

I think anyone else would have given up and found a better job by now. I think just having this horrific experience on her resume could get her hired almost anywhere in a heartbeat.

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It's not that bad. The people who are the saltiest on the forum are the ones with unreasonable expectations of what Samsung "owes" users of SmartThings for both the platform in general and the migration.

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It's not that bad. The people who are the saltiest on the forum are the ones with unreasonable expectations of what Samsung "owes" users of SmartThings for both the platform in general and the migration.

Not that bad?

So, you don't think Samsung owes it's customers a product with the same functionality it had when they sold it to us? It is not a perspective I share.

I'm sure they covered their a$$es in the EULA, but I never would have bought that PoS and invested as much personal IP as I did to build my own ecosystem around it, if I had known what would happen a few short years later. It is an effing sh!t show, and unless you are shilling for them or promoting a product on their new Lua/edge ecosystem, I cannot see how you could see this as anything else.

If you mean by "it's not so bad" that your groovy stuff still works, enjoy it while it lasts. If you mean your stuff already has working Lua drivers, and you are satisfied by available automation options, you are lucky.

Just take a random sampling of the tone on a few threads on ST forum compared to this one and tell me its just "unreasonable expectations". From what I see, the only people really engaging anymore there on most of the other threads are all developers trying to figure this crap out - and they are having major problems that poor @nayelyz is trying to sort out for them. If Samsung really gave an effing crap about this, there would be 10+ developers all over this, not just 1 or 2 poor souls that will likely be gone soon after dealing with this crap for so long! They have already lost the engagement of their customer base, and they have done nothing to smooth this transition. Here on HE , I see a healthy engagement of users at all levels as well as developers and customer support - it could not be a more night and day difference, IMHO.

If it was important to Samsung, they could have invested the resources to make this whole thing a non issue, but it is clear that they just don't care. Some middle manager idiot must have decided this was the right thing to do, but failed to estimate the required resources and time, as well as impact to their ecosystem and customer base, as well as their competitor's positions. They could have been in a better position than Apple/Google/AWS, but they completely muffed it. I'm sure it will be taught in tech MBA courses for years to come! ST is definitely the next X10 - RIP.

The actual users still engaged who aren't qvetching either don't give a sh!t, don't know yet, or have already joined us here on HE!

Life is short. No reason to get all upset about a hobby.

How long should Samsung have supported the zero yearly support cost system that you invested so much into? 2 years? 5? 10? 20?

For less than $100 the hardware I purchased (the hub) paid for itself. If Samsung had charged me yearly support I would have expected more. For the low low price of free, I got exactly what I contracted for. All the devices and are portable to another platform, so that's not money lost.

Other companies and products have gone completely belly up or made into a completely different product (insteon, wink) so I appreciate that Samsung is migrating from one platform design that made sense in 2016, allowing the reuse of existing hardware (V2 and v3 hubs) to leverage a completely new platform and environment, all without asking for a nickel.

If I don't like it, I have other options, including Hubitat which I run in parallel.

I'm not a shill nor am I a Samsung fanboi. I'm just a hobbyist who understands that none of these companies "owe" me jack. Including Hubitat.

If you want a long term supported home automation platform, you'd be better served with Crestron or Control 4. They offer support contacts to make sure that your world isn't affected by hardware or software changes over time. Otherwise you get what you pay for with hobbyist class systems.

I do agree that the transition could have been better documented, communicated and with better tools and visibility for end users. But again I have paid Samsung exactly $0.00 over the cost of the hub in exchange for countless hours of cloud CPU and storage over the years, so I consider myself ahead in the game.

For now, I'm sticking it out with Edge. Who knows how it will turn out. My perspective is different and I'm not going to let it ruin my day.

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Definitely not unprecedented. Wink (does that still exist?), Revolv (Google bought it and then shut it down, bricking everyone’s hubs), Iris, Osram bridge. I’m sure there are more examples. The writing has been on the wall for several years. I am just surprised that it has taken this long. After all, this is the company that released the NX-1 DSLR, a camera that was ahead of its time, then shuttered the entire camera division shortly after. It wasn’t long after that that I moved from SmartThings to Hubitat.

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I'm confused. Is this a thread about wondering whether samsung give a crap?

Hasn't the answer to this been demonstrated countless times?

You want to hang in there, then hang in there. I left 2 years ago and it seems the advocates are still (!) continuing to spout the same old...

"it will be all better soon though!"

Good luck with the unwinnable quest. I'll be sure to check in again with this utter nonsense in another 2 years to see if there's been some awesome fixes applied, and no problems remain.

/ excited

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IMO this is too much to expect for a product as heavily cloud-dependent as ST. I’m not suggesting it’s “right” or “fair,” but as @Ken_Fraleigh explained:

Here’s another recent example. And there’s an entire website dedicated to products and services that Google killed (Revolv is on that list).

These cloud-dependent services aren’t a 1940s era refrigerator. Again, I’m not commenting on whether this is the right way to treat customers, just that we should always be prepared for the possibility that some future, unfortunate series of events could turn a cloud-dependent tech product into a brick.

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