Just saw this posted yesterday in the SmartThings Community:
To summarize, this was posted on September 23, and it says that effective September 25, SMS is being cut off for non-US SmartThings users, and US users will have to send a text back to remain opted in. Rate limiting is also in effect (100 messages/day; not sure what it was before). That's less than two days to prepare for the change.
For comparison, Hubitat staff notified us on July 25 (with the release of 2.1.3) that built-in SMS support would be removed as of two firmware versions into the then-future (with the release of 2.1.5). I was expecting that to be a few weeks out from that announcement, but it's now two months later and we've only heard hints of 2.1.5--so quite a bit of time to prepare.
Of course, the changes are a bit different in magnitude: the ST changes are probably minimal for US users who don't excessively use (abuse?) the service, but they're quite abrupt for international users; Hubitat requires a change in both cases. The ST ToS certainly allow this, but I just wanted to say how much nicer it is to be notified of things like this with time to prepare.
(Posting in Lounge for obvious reasons, but this could still concern any Hubitat user who was planning on using some HE-to-ST "relay" like HubConnect to workaround Hubitat's own SMS changes. My recommendation would be similar to that of both platforms: strongly consider push notifications instead. It's not like you avoid the cloud either way.)
Just my two cents: I work for a courthouse and we used text messaging for paging emergency services when radio signal is not the strongest in the rural areas. We actually got cut off by the provider and had to jump through hoops to get this enabled again. It seems that the providers may want this to be a paid service. At least that's what I gathered from our experience here. Even with emergency services, they're getting bucky.
Yeah, my employer uses a two-factor authentication service that supports text, calls, and push notifications. When it was new (to us), they didn't seem to care how you set it up; now they're strongly encouraging you to use push. I assume there must be similar reasons regarding the pricing of SMS (and possibly calls).
Same. I work for a local government agency and we've been slowly moving away from SMS as well due to costs. Over the past year, the costs for SMS have gone up a lot and my department has been tasked with being able to continue real-time messaging while moving away from SMS. I'm guessing that since the US is one of the last countries in the world that keeps embracing SMS as a notification medium, the rise in costs for SMS is to maybe push Americans to stop using SMS so much?
So, we've been experimenting with Google GCM, Apple's APN, Whatsapp, and Twillo. So far, I've been pretty impressed with both GCM and APN, but they both have their cons. Whatsapp is not too bad, but I'm not fan of Twillo.
