PowerView 4+

Great app, despite occasional inconsistencies

I have had 11 Hunter-Douglas PowerView shades for the past 4 months, and added a 12th just last week. I’m an app developer, and I’ve been impressed with everything Hunter-Douglas got right: the UI is especially intuitive, and for the most part, the app and especially the shades have been rock-solid reliable.

However — there’s a continuing issue with the app occasionally not setting the scene data in the hub correctly. It appears as if the scene data can somehow get corrupted between creating/modifying a scene, and then transmitting that scene data to be stored in the hub.

This issue was verified when Hunter-Douglas’ superb support technician guided me to slightly change the scene data, causing it to be written out to the hub again. That solved my problem.

As an app developer it appears to be an initialization or corruption issue, which could be tracked down by embedding more data validation into the app. I might suggest the data be checksummed and the checksum be stored both in the app and on the hub. That way, any degradation of data could be automatically detected and perhaps the issue could be found and corrected.

All that said, the above issue is mostly a temporary frustration: the product has been a pleasure to work with, and now that HomeKit is supported, I can ask Siri to invoke any scene.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your feedback, specifically about setting Scene data in the Hub. We always design with the intent to provide you with the best experience possible, and will certainly take your feedback into consideration for future updates.

Worst purchase experience ever

I ordered 3 blinds in November and one of them still doesn’t work at the end of March. At the first install they never sent the mounting brackets. At the second install they were the wrong mounting brackets. At the third attempt they sent the wrong mounting brackets again. Finally my dealer mounted them without any brackets which is nearly impossible to get level so my blinds will never be perfect. The hub they sent failed to update itself and had to be returned to two months to send a new one. Then we noticed one of the blinds had the wrong bottom bar type and didn’t match the other two. Then one of the motors failed to program and it took three months for Hunter Douglas to send a new one. When the new motor arrived it worked at first and when I linked it to the PowerView app it lost the program stops and now I’m told it has to be returned to the factory again to be reset.

I have a customer service call record it would take days to read. Half the representatives are nice and helpful the other half refused to help me and just tell me this the dealers job call your dealer.

Terrible business model. Stay away from PowerView blinds at all costs.

Great App, but poor iOS accessibility support

I love this app. It is well thought out and helps me control my Hunter Douglas shades at my fingertips. But unfortunately it does not support accessibility users. When my device is set to zoomed mode, many elements don’t appear on the screen. One example is the initial screen to connect to the local Network. The user is required to select a continue button, which is intended to be rendered at the bottom of the screen, but in zoomed, it mode doesn’t even render on the screen at all. So I’m required to go into my device settings and disable zoomed mode in order to continue using the app. Similar experience when editing scenes: most of the scene icons don’t render on the screen in zoomed mode. Please be mindful of your visually impaired users when developing and testing your app.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your feedback. The way you interact with our app is important to us, and we will certainly take your feedback regarding accessibility into consideration for future updates.