Question

What is your thoughts on smart home products planned obsolescence and supported technology life spans? How long should a manufacturer support? What is the home owners expectation of various smart home products life span?  

Answer 1

So this is why I'm migrating away from ST. I've been a user for 4+ years and generally been pretty happy with them. Late last year, my v2 hub died unexpectedly. Devices fail and that's expected. so I bit the bullet and bought a v3 hub. Then painfully re-integrate my 90+ physical devices to a new v3 hub. Took almost a week for the process but all is well. then one of my Inovelli switch kept on getting dropped. Also I couldnt add integrate recently-added Lutron switches. I called support and was told that I had too many devices on my hub. And in order for them to help me, I have to remove Webcore integration. I was told that ST platform isnt designed for a power user like myself. Their ideal userbase is the casual user with basic automation. What some of us are doing here using Webcore is out of their scope and in order for them to troubleshoot any issues, we have to remove that integration. Webcore is such an integral part of my automation so yes, I'm still without my Inovelli switch and newly-added Lutron devices. That was the last straw. I expect my product to work as long as it's not physically broken. but the software side should last "forever".  

Comments

Unfortunately, there arent many. The two I've considered were Home Assistant and HomeSeer. The latter requires lots of money up front between their software and plugins (eg. Hue plugin $40, Harmony $40, Blue Iris $40, etc. ). It can add up. So I'm currently setting up HA. It's a steep learning curve (very! ) and I'm still learning. But the more immersion I'm doing in HA, the more impressed I am with it's function. And another unintended consequence. it's local. A small annoyance with cloud I just encountered this week. I have pihole on my network and it's blocking ads based on a github list. Somehow one of the server used by ActionTiles is blocked by pihole causing DNS error on my tablets. So now I have to figure out what site(s) got blocked and try to whitelist it. I hope once I have everything running 100% in HA, I wont have to run to any of these issues.  

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Hubitat is where it's at. At least that's what my ubber tech buddy tells me. Hes on the leading edge always. Says it's a pretty good product, but totally different to st.  

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Just to go back to what the OP is saying. will the company be there in X years? or what's stopping them from changing their scope like ST did (forcing us to use the new app, getting rid of routines, etc)? Hubitat is a closed platform and, personally for me, I'm done giving control to of my devices to others. I've put in many, many hours in getting my ST ecosystem configured the way I want to. but only to have ST tell me recently--sorry, go pound sand. I get that ST doesnt owe me anything. but lesson learned. Community fed open source is the way to go.  

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I'm confused to why ST felt the need to change the platform so much but once the user created device and such catch up with the new api I think ST will be fine again. the new platform does seem to be traying to make it easier for cloud to cloud style devices and they look to be trying to impliment a way fro smart apps to be shared from with in the smartthings app so no one has to copy code and all that fun stuff. It looks to me like they are trying for a more casual market.  

Answer 2

Depends on the product

Answer 3

Definitely depends on the product. For hubs, I'd want to see a minimum of 4-6 years for updates and backwards compatibility for another 2-3. I work in the IT field and a typical hardware support lifespan is 7 years. For switches / bulbs, I'm looking for a much longer compatibility lifespan (10 yrs).  

Answer 4

Open source = lasts a lifetime