Hacker News Reader

Comment by verelo | Hacker News Reader

This! I made my entire house HomeKit, only to rip it all out and replace it with SmartThings. An expensive mistake but HomeKit is terrible; slow, expensive, limited functionality and compatibility and a massive lack of devices that connect to it.

View on HN

I never tried HomeKit (not really in Apple's ecosystem), but I do like SmartThings. I won't say I "love" SmartThings, there are many things I can complain about it, but the bottom line is SmartThings provided a very powerful platform, you can write Groovy code to achieve most of the goals you have, even though the process of writing such code might be painful (for example, their web IDE is, let's just say, not the best). You can even add incompatible devices into SmartThings (for example I added my MyQ garage door control into SmartThings with customized device handler).

> you can write Groovy code to achieve most of the goals you have, even though the process of writing such code might be painful

Perhaps SmartThings needs to provide another scripting language besides Apache Groovy, one that's pleasurable to write, not painful. Gradle 3.0 added Kotlin, which works seamlessly with the IntelliJ IDE -- SmartThings could do the same!

It's not the problem with Groovy language itself. I think Groovy is good enough (and simple enough) for SmartThings' use case. It's just that you have to do things in SmartThings' web IDE (of course you can use some local IDE/editor and then copy paste to the web IDE in the end), and also work with SmartThings' APIs. The web IDE and the API documents are kind of hit or miss.

You shou

You wha

Reply on news.ycombinator.com