The Shade Store V2

Most of my shades are the previous generation with the proprietary power connector. Just got a few new shades with the microusb connector and these always show up as “low battery” in homekit. Can this be fixed? Edit June 2024: This is still a problem. All microusb shades still show Low Battery. They’ve all gone thru multiple charge cycles. The “low battery” is only in homekit. The shade store app shows the correct status. Tried unpairing shades and repairing. No dice.

It takes a while to connect using HomeKit - and sometimes it just doesn’t connect at all. Usually gets stuck at “connecting”. Very unreliable, no good alternatives though but don’t expect this to work well

I have 14 shades, various rooms, scenes, and timers. It was fairly easy to set up the rooms, shades, scenes, and timers. The WiFi Hub claims that its signal extends 100 feet. That wasn’t my experience. It maxes out around 25-30 feet for me. When adding each shade (or device as they call it), I generally had to move the WiFi Hub to the room where I was adding the shade, so that it could make the initial connection with the shade. Once the shades were all added, I was able to find a central place from which the WiFi Hub could control all the shades. I note the following problems: 1) One of the last screens to connect a shade presents you with 2 black “buttons”, neither of which is labeled. I discovered by pressing them that the first lets you add the shade to a new Hub, and the second lets you add the shade to the current hub. These buttons need to be labeled. 2) The timers allow you to specify the times that shades are opened or closed. This includes sunrise and sunset, as well as the ability to specify a certain number of hours and/or minutes before or after. Nowhere in the app does it tell you what time it believes that sunrise and sunset occur today. It should. It certainly doesn’t agree with what my Apple Watch says is sunrise and sunset. Rather, it seems to lag the Apple Watch by 15-20 minutes. Suggestion: I’m always wondering if and when the timer is going to activate. It would be nice if I could go to a screen in the app and it would tell me, in sequential order, what time each of my upcoming timers will activate, and also display the correct times for sunrise and sunset in that sequential order, assuming they haven’t already passed. If I go to that screen at night after all the timers have finished for the day, show me the ones for the upcoming day.

The shade store requires you to pay a ton of money for their shades and then use apps to control the shades don't work. I've had the shades for years and I've had problems every single year. The latest is the app no longer works. I took an hour to reprogram all my shades as they were deleted out of the app, although the "scenes" and "timers" still existed. After taking an hour to do this I had everything working again. Only to find the next day all the shades had disappeared. Do yourself a favor and get Lutron shades.

technology is awful, often times the app will lose connection. but it worked about 75% until the last month…app is terrible. it deleted all devices. took an hour to add them all back…everything worked until the next day, when it deleted all devices again. the shade store has installed expensive, worthless junk and i’m now resorting to throwing it all out to get a new system. DO NOT BUY THESE SHADES, the app will not allow you to automate.

Same install issue with the hub. For me, I was prompted by HomeKit to upgrade to their new architecture. Once I did that, the shade store app worked as expected.

Most of my shades are the previous generation with the proprietary power connector. Just got a few new shades with the microusb connector and these always show up as “low battery” in homekit. Can this be fixed?

Spent more than an hour trying to connect a new hub, with no luck. This app is really that BAD, other reviews are true. I wish I checked the reviews before buying the hub. Tried all possible WiFi router configurations (incl. disabling 5ghz at all), resetting, etc. Error messages and instructions were totally useless. Fortunately, I eventually learnt that I could download Automate Pulse 2 which is the app for the same exact hub (just with a different sticker). That app is pretty bad too, but at least I got things connected.

Every now and then all my Alexa integrations will break. EVERY SINGLE TIME it’s because this app just randomly forgets about my curtains… why?!?! It cannot be that hard to store something! In fact, I know it’s not, because I’m also a developer.. would you like some help debugging your app?

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.