The reason
Quite recently on eWeLink’s official Telegram group the community had a discussion about the reordering devices issues: you can’t reorder devices in the lower part of the reordering screen. This issue already exists since eWeLink 4.0.0 beta for Android and has reported many times back then. People feel frustrated that eWeLink doesn’t take the input of the eWeLink community very seriously. Even the survey we have held back in November 2020 didn’t move things forward.
The public letter
The owner of this website has written a public letter to Coolkit to make clear how important the community can be to them:
Subject: Public letter: eWeLink should take community seriously regarding feature requests and bugfixes
Hi,
Greetings and frustrations from The Netherlands, Europe.
I’m the owner of the eWeLink community website at https://ewelinkcommunity.net. I’m also very active at the eWeLink official Telegram group at https://t.me/ewelinksupport and on the eWeLink & Sonoff User Group on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/ewelinkandsonoff/. I’m writing this email mainly on behalf of the community and partly for my own. This letter have been published publicly on https://ewelinkcommunity.net/2021/01/public-letter-to-ewelink-about-community-input-about-feature-requests-and-bugs-to-fix/.
A very frequent topic on the social media were I’m active on regarding eWeLink related topics are frequent asked features and bugs to fix that never gets implemented in the eWeLink app / framework. Many of them are already implemented in other smart home frameworks /apps. Because eWeLink doesn’t make clear what feature requests and bugfixes have the highest priority I tried with a survey to make clear for at least the community what they believe which feature requests and bugs are the most important to implement. The results of that survey can be found at https://ewelinkcommunity.net/2020/12/results-of-ewelink-features-bugs-survey-november-2020/ and the raw results have been send to your eWeLink employee back then (name of employee mentioned in actual mail).
It is dissatisfying to see to the community (and to me too) that eWeLink didn’t share any response to this survey and also didn’t implement any feature request or bugfix on the lists on the survey. The main reason of this e-mail is the discussion / frustration people recently had again on the Telegram group about the inability to reorder devices. When moving to the lower part of the list with devices at the reordering screen the spacer that indicates where you want to put a devices you selected and hold doesn’t move any further down. THIS ISSUE ALREADY EXISTS SINCE EWELINK 4.0.0 BETA! I participated in that beta and already reported the issue back then! A video of the issue can be seen at https://t.me/ewelinksupport/28527. I also have seen a video of the same screen on iOS and the iOS version of the app doesn’t seem to have the issue.
Another topic that frustrates people is not being able to use LAN mode in the way people thinks it should work. The name LAN mode pretends that you can use the devices that supports it on the moment you don’t have an active internet connection. People are very disappointed that it actually never works. The apps hangs or devices simply won’t react to any command given at the app whilst both the mobile phone and the device are on the same network and with LAN mode enabled. People also expect the LAN mode being able to run scenes without the need for an internet connection.
One of the very common feature requests I see is the ability to list one device more than 1 times in a scene. Especially for RF Bridge owners this is very frustrating as they can not add more than 1 RF sensor trigger. But there are many more situations where you want to add the same device more than once in both the triggers and the actions sections of a scene.
The above mentioned survey lists many more frequently requested feature requests and bugs to fix. Many people start to feel sorry for me that eWeLink doesn’t take their customers and the outcome of my survey seriously and are moving away from a direct usage of the eWeLink app. Many of those users are moving to Home Assistant and some of them even flash their devices with other firmware like Tasmota. In both cases all users are happy to have much more features than the eWeLink app offers.
Please be aware a lot of users don’t want to fill in in-app forms to report issues they have with the eWeLink app. They just write it on social media, forums, etc. Those frustrations are easy to find for eWeLink. Just be active on social media and you quickly will find what’s important to the community.
I would really advise eWeLink to seriously listen to the input of the community. It could make the eWeLink app much better and a good competitor to other smart home platforms. At this moment there are much smart home platforms that have much better automation features than eWeLink has.
I look really forward for your reply on above story. If you like I can put a statement of eWeLink on my website which I will also share on the above mentioned Facebook page and Telegram group so that you can reach at least a good amount of the community.
Kind regards,
Jeroen Maathuis
owner eWeLink community website
