The Shade Store V2 4+

Developer is missing the point.

While I appreciate the developer's offer of assistance, he misses the point. They should be fixing the app, not telling customers they should make arrangements for someone to walk through it with them on the phone.

After the required phone calls and a couple of hours of work I was able to get the app to work. The instructions and UI are poor. Lots of room for improvement.

1) The app needs access, via a 2.5Ghz wifi network. Not wired, not 5Ghz band. If you have an IOT network with client isolation, it has to be temporarily disabled. Phone support told me I also had to disconnect all the satellites in the mesh network, but that was not necessary. Phone support knows their script, they don't know networking.

2) When the shade pairing instructions say "tap P2 twice" on the remote, they don't mean click-click. They mean click, wait for the jog/beep, click again, wait for the jog/beep, then hit Next.

3) The shades are presented in the order you add them, not sorted by name. They can fix this.

4) On the correct network, I still got a message about not being on the network when I tried to adjust the top/bottom settings. Another day.

This can be made to work, but requires patience and the willingness to mess with your router/wifi settings.

Maybe v3 will be intended for consumers, v2 is not.

First hub works well, can’t seem to set up the second

It took some persistence, but I got the hub set up with six window shades. There’s an issue with two black buttons lacking labels every time I add a device. I was able to use the screen reading accessibility feature to learn the top one is to add another device and the bottom one finishes out the current one. Credit for those being labeled for the screen reader; however, I had to go through several buttons that were not labeled for accessibility.

So now I have everything working with scenes in Home Kit. I decided to try adding my 3rd floor window to my first floor hub, and it worked! Kinda. It’s not reliable, which is why I have a second hub, but while I can add it to Home Kit, the app fails to pair and wants to delete the Home Kit setup and start over. I haven’t worked through that yet.

One note. When I set up the Home app, I had added the six windows to The Shade Store app, so Home just pulled all six in quite nicely. When I added the upstairs window, I couldn’t see a way to add it to the Home app. Unplugging the hub and plugging it back in did the trick, now I’ve got all seven windows. I’ll see if it can control that seventh without a hub in the same room—I doubt it.

There’s also a discrepancy in the battery readings in this app and the Home app—for the couple windows showing a power level in the Home app.

Developer Response ,

Dear Daryl Zero,

My name is Justin Hoffman, I spearhead The Shade Store’s IT team. I’m so sorry for any inconvenience you may have experienced working with your Hub setup and HomeKit. Please know, any issues you’re continuing to experience regarding setup and connection we can absolutely fix for you. It is possible there is some variance in HomeKit and internal battery readings, they are slightly different. I’m putting our contact email address below, please reach out when time permits and we can set up a call or video consultation, and can walk through any issues at all you still may be experiencing (although it sounds like you solved most of your initial obstacles).  

But again, I’m so sorry for any inconvenience, and assure we will rectify any issues you are having as quickly as possible.

Sincerely,
Justin Hoffman
SVP, Development
THE SHADE STORE
smarthome@theshadestore.com

Doesn’t work

I had the first version of the hub and app, it didn’t work. A tech came out and tried to troubleshoot, couldn’t figure it out, so ordered the new version of the hub (and I downloaded the new app). This also doesn’t work, and for the same reasons.

Getting the bridge added required a phone call to tech support who acknowledged there was a problem with the app/setup process and their current workaround was to turn Wi-Fi off when I got to the time zone setting page. I tried this multiple times before it would add the bridge. I had better luck setting the bridge up through Apple Home then allowing the Shade Store app to find it, than I did setting it up from the Shade Store app from the start.

Once the bridge was added, I went to add the shades. I had the same issue as the first version of the hub/app, in that it does not pair to the shades well, taking multiple attempts and minutes to pair, and when it does pair it deletes them at will a minute later. I could never get more than 1-2 shades paired/added to the app at one time.