Graber Motorization

Put this in last week with our new blinds. It worked the first day then not. Called tech support and 2 1/2 hours on phone to get them back into the gateway and worked for a day again. Called tech support. Told me the my WiFi HAS to be 2.4 ONLY!!! Who even has a 2.4 network at home anymore. Spoke with my IT company to see if I downgraded the whole network might help and it STILL doesn’t work. Terrible app that clearly should not be available to the public as it really is nonfunctional.

This app is anything but user friendly. I had my new motorized blinds installed 2 days ago and the app still doesn’t run them correctly. (Installed and set up professionally and 2+ hours spent in the phone with tech support. I’m now very sad I didn’t go with a better brand. Buyer beware. Not worth the time or money. Myself and the installer/programmer have installed and uninstalled the app several times. Routines are set but don’t work, blinds that were programmed in disappear and you have to close out the app or uninstall. The Gateway only runs 5 blinds, they don’t tell you that until you purchase them and they fail, I have 10 blinds so only half connect at a time. A complete disappointment.

If I knew how horrible this app was, we would not have purchased the motorized option or their blinds in general. App is never consistent, sometimes offline or can’t find the gateway. Can’t keep the scheduled tasks. What’s the point of purchasing if I can’t control it from my phone like I’m supposed to

Easy setup process. Works great with the rooms functionality. Doesn't let me select a time in relation to sunset or sunrise with routines, though. It only let's me select a specific time. The other options are greyed out, even though I gave location access always. Very frustrating as sunset/sun rise is a very important time marker for shades being opened and closed. Would 100% be 5 stars if this was fixed.

I thought motorization was supposed to help me and save time. What were shade designer thinking of!! This a horrible system that I have been fighting with since the day I installed the shades. I would advise anyone to buy your motor blinds from anyone else but Graber. The shade are expensive but quality. The motor and web components are total trash. If you buy Graber motorized blinds you will spend hours and days each year resetting them, be on hold with the 100s of other people in front of you waiting for technical support and waiting days looking at blinding LED lights on components wondering what is going on. For all these reason DON’T BUY GRABER, SPRINGS FASHION OR BALI BLINDS BECAUSE THEY ARE SOME ANTIQUATED, NON E-TECHNICAL OLD FARTS TRYING TO STAY CURRENT IN A CHANGING WORLD. Remember I told you so!

This app was revised to be HORRIBLE. Before it was intuitive. Now, it’s a mess. Some new software engineer was hired who got C’s in college.

As another reviewer put it so eloquently, this app is terrible. It take about 30 seconds for my Z-wave hub or motorized shades to wake and become usable each time I want to control them. That is a long time to wait, staring at an app while it’s unusable. The app apparently has no memory of the shades it was able to control last time it was used, so each time I open it, I have to wait and wait just to get it to populate a list of available shades/devices to control. Automations do work if I set them up within this app, but the “Add to Siri” switch does nothing, so it’s a lie that there is any usable Siri integration. I rated this more than one star only because automations do work. Controlling the shades with Alexa has a similar wait time problem though it’s more usable. I can at least see what blinds should exist and send one a command before Alexa then spins on “waiting for SWF gateway” or some such. Voice control is a bit better because I can send a command and move on without waiting for an app to spin in the foreground while my iPhone is unusable for the duration. My asks to the developers would be: • Please fix Siri integration • Make the device list persistent. When the app is launched, begin contacting the hub in a background thread while allowing the user to queue commands to shades we already know exist. Once the hub has responded, adjust the list as needed and send the queued commands. That way, at least we can send commands right away and switch apps or sleep the iPhone, knowing the commands will likely go through whenever the devices can finally be reached.

Can rarely connect to app and it’s not user friendly when it does. All but one of my remotes is paired so I can use that blind. BTW this is my second gateway the other just stopped working after a month or two.

App got better with the last update but now it is very slow to open and load shades.

If I could give zero stars I would. The blinds themselves are great but the app and constantly being offline is beyond frustrating.