Wink to start charging $4.99 a month to control your devices UNBELIEVABLE

Wouldn't something like "Automatically add the FIRST 50 devices to this Dashboard" be the bridge between 'other hub apps' and choking Hubitat with 200 devices in a dashboard?

Maybe that's a Thread for the Developer Category :smiley:

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Not a bad idea. If you have >50 devices you aren't really a novice anymore, and just have to suck it up and make some dashboards. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Just looking at how the support section of this community has blown up in the last few days, that alone to me justifies going back to the MSRP price, granted I doubt that was even intentional.

I say this as someone who purchased around the $115 price a while back. Worth every penny and I plan to buy my second device once I need it easily at $130.

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I'm glad I looked carefully before deciding on what hub to buy. That seems terrible to me. There's nothing worse to me than the "It just works (as long as you want it to work the way we told you to)" philosophy. I find that designers never know how I will actually use something, and me having to learn to use something the way they told me to just pisses me off. It also inevitably results in me spending massive amounts of time trying to learn how to make it do something it should be able to do, before finding out it can't. I guess that's why I don't run Mac OS. I would, since so little software lists Linux as a supported operating system, but I just hate how it "just" works.

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All three of my Mac Mini's in this room just burst into tears. :smiley: :smiley: The two in that other room didn't hear you. :smiley:

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Yeah except that's all us "free" community people helping :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Well, I posted here early on about the irony of the notice from Wink appearing just a couple of hours after my Hubitat arrived. I had been very unhappy with Wink for quite some time, pretty much since will.I.am bought the company (that’s when the rapid downhill spiral began).

The way they ended the support call line was pretty crappy, they just went dark. I was getting so frustrated with 20 - 30 second activation times, if the shortcuts worked at all. The seemingly constant Server Errors, the loss of linking in my Ring doorbell and my Sensi thermostat. I was basically holding my breath every time I hit a button on the app in suspense.

I WILL miss the Quirky Power Pivots, they are still sold on Amazon, and were a pretty good value @ $24 for two smart and two normal outlets. But even with them, the connectivity was becoming sporadic. Most of all, I will miss being able to remotely control my Quirky window air conditioner, the device that I stumbled onto during a summer outage with my central air that introduced me to Wink. I guess I’ll get used to walking across the room to adjust it (yep, still works great, and useful in my home office where I run six computers).

Now, that all being said... it took a bit of tinkering to get the basic feel of the Hubitat, but one of the things I prize the most is customization. While I have a ways to go in tweaking the details completely to my tastes, so far the Dashboards are highly appealing to that side of me that loathes being forced into a cookie cutter setup. In just two days, I am already immeasurably happier with this system than I have been with Wink over the last two years.

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I really wish I could use Mac OS. I have tried multiple times... but I always end up pissed off. It would make my life so much easier...

I'm not sure how many people used NextOS. I was a user (not by choice), and I hated it. I heard it was really easy to develop for NextOS, but to me it was everything I hated about Mac and nothing I liked. Mac OS X was better than NextOS, but I still hate it. If I was forced to use Mac I would just open a terminal, make it full screen, then be flummoxed by there being no difference between file.txt and File.txt.

Now that Microsoft is loving Linux, I'm starting to like MS products. I have an actual client for MS Teams installed natively in Linux, and the Office365 on-line apps are slightly better than garbage. I don't think WSL is ready for prime time, but it's encouraging.

Are you referring to the smartthings classic app or the new one? I never bothered to use the new one, but IIRC the platform existed for ~4 years with the old app before they introduced the new one.

So in a couple years perhaps hubitat will have a mobile app more like what you and your family are looking for?

I agree with that--I think a lot of people here do, too. Not everyone does, and they probably don't belong on Hubitat. Some people want an out-of-the-box experience with no setup, and Hubitat does not deliver that.

For me, the requirement for 100% local control/processing limits the potential choices. I'm pretty sure Hubitat is a lot easier to get running than OpenHAB...

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Ok family so I can clear some of my thoughts, I said in one of my earlier post that I would purchase HE at any price point, The reason I wish for certain things is because i do want to stay with this platform. But I am a married man happily I might add. When me and my wife got married my grandfather gave me a piece of advise, You want to keep a happy household pick your battles with your wife.

My wife has allowed me to transform our house into a HA dream she has been on the ride for the ups and the downs not being able to turn on a light to it working perfectly. That being said she also has to be happy in this house, I can't just be the one happy there are others in my household.

Now the reason I keep saying a true app is that i don't call something an app if there is complicated work on the backend. I can manage my system and do the stuff that is needed to be done but as I stated above I am away from home a lot for my business and that leaves it to my wife to manage the system. When it works it works fine but if we have an internet outage or a power outage like we have here where we live at in GA it's a headache for her because then she has to wait for me to get the time to get to a computer and sort it out.

So as far as what I need in a app is something that a novice person can understand, i hate smartthtings with a passion I mean to my bones but she could just use that app she could setup devices she could go to the app and find why something wasn't working with HE she can't do that and in her words "babe I work hard everyday i don't want a second job' she feels that the dashboards and the platform has her doing extra stuff when she just doesn't want to do. The dashboards in her opinion are not a true app I have linked them to her phone and she hates them she says "I open them I have to wait like 5 minutes for them to open and then they are all jumbled up" she has a Note 10 Plus 5g and she doesn't like the way the icons fit her phone. with smartthings I had tablets all over the house as backups to voice control if needed I cant do that with HE because there was always an issue with screen demensions showing up correctly. she would be home when I was away working open the dashboard and it would tell her a light was on when it was off, so the dashboards would not sync at times. Because the dashboard lined the apps up funny she would miss an icon becuase she would forget you had to scroll right. She would call me asking why the dashboard wasnt working and she would get mad when I said sweetheart are you in local or cloud dashboard and she would yell because she would say WTF why do I have to make that damn choice just show me my damn devices so i can control them.I also tried sharptools but the implementation they have for HE isn't the same as the one for smarthings.

So I guess all i'm asking for is an app that can be used by a novice user to turn things on off if needed add devices if needed check status of devices if needed. Ok if anyone has used smartthings what I want is something in the way of action tiles the HE staff could reach out to that developer and ask him to develop for HE maybe I dont know but asking to have an app isn't a big ask in my opinion.

Action Tiles was 'courted' in the early days of Hubitat, because the founders were all ST community members. No, was the answer, repeatedly.

Do you have iPhones?

Could try Sharp Tools. It supports hubitat. Not free, though. I think it is $3/mo. Very easy to use though, and the most similar to action tiles.

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me and my wife use Android phones my 3 kids iphones. I've tried Sharp tools was just to clunky for the wife.

Darn. I would of suggested homebridge and homekit and been done.

Homekit is the best app of everything I’ve seen.

I use this and also include 3 cameras integrated into it.

I'm not going to claim creating dashboards is the easiest, I think it's very cumbersome. That being said, you can design it to look nice on her phone, but it would take time. I agree, the dashboards are very powerful, but clunky to build (I say this as a developer -- it looks like something a developer designed, not someone who knows UX/UI).

As far as it taking "5 minutes" I suspect you have the "include all devices" setting set. That makes the dashboards unbearably slow. To me that's a bug, but the simple fix is to list out the specific devices you want. It's still a little slow, but closer to 10 seconds for me whereas it used to take minutes.

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What about using google home on your phone ?

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You have been told numerous times, that the existing app and the dashboards are the way that the Hubitat designers have decided that their ecosystem will work. You have been told that they will not be changing that decision. Yet you insist on bring it up again and again and again and again.

It just amazes me the lack of understanding in this matter.

It sounds like you're having slowness problems that shouldn't be happening. My dashboard just comes up immediately. My tablets sometimes take a couple seconds to refresh the layout. Maybe contact support, and take a look at the past logs. Also, don't keep all devices accessible to the dashboard if they aren't used by it (in dashboard set-up there's an option for what devices to include).

Also, I found that I'm pretty happy with the built-in dashboard (lots of people are using other things like SharpTools), but I have different dashboards for different devices. I have a phone dashboard designed for portrait orientation that works fine on my Galaxy S10e and my wife's Galaxy Note 9, and a different set of dashboards designed for my tablets in landscape orientation. I don't use the auto-fit, but it takes some fiddling to get the layout right. Try looking through the (long) dashboard thread to see what various people have done with them:

This forum is great for figuring out how to do things in the dashboard layout. Lots of helpful people!

Once you have a link to the cloud dashboard with the layout designed for your phones, you should be able to use that anywhere. That way your wife wouldn't need to figure out what dashboard to use (cloud is a bit slower by default but I don't think it's terrible). Try this: open the link to the dashboard in Chrome on your Android phone, then go to the three dots menu and choose "Add to home." At that point you basically have a custom app, with whatever dashboard tiles you chose (and only those tiles), arranged as you designed it. It even defaults to the Hubitat icon on your home screen. (Probably something like that available for iPhones/Safari but I use mine as little as possible because I hate it.)

If you put together a nice dashboard, you'll find the WAF to be quite high. My wife thinks this stuff is stupid, and we should just use old fashioned light switches (she was actually yelling at me when I installed our GE/Jasco Z-wave switches), but quickly found it was useful to be able to shut off the flood lights from our bed when they were accidentally left on. It took a few days, but I'd bet she'd yell at me if I started ripping them out, now.

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