The Shade Store V2

It keeps removing two shades after a few days that were added.

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.

The hub works fine the app will not stay programmed lose all rooms and blings within 2 hours of programming very frustrating

Setup my shades day one and they worked fine with my google home. The next day, the shades are deleted from the app. Not sure why update: hooked the hub into a single band 2.4ghz router and connected all the shades to it and now everything works as expected. if this info was more easily accessible (had to look through the reviews to find this fix) i wouldnt mind. the ui still needs work tho, too many clicks to adjust the setup.

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.

This app is total garbage. I spent over $15K on shades from the Shade Store with the sole purpose of being able to control shades from my phone. I have spent countless hours trying to setup the hub. I thought maybe my Netgear Nighthawk router was the problem so I installed a google nest mesh WiFi and I’m still not able to add a hub through the app. It takes me through the setup process just fine till the final page where it says “Sorry! There was a problem configuring your new hub. Please check your hub and try again later.” Really? That’s the error I get each and every time I have attempted to install the hub. I even deleted my Apple HomeKit app from my phone just so there is no interference and still not been able to add the hub. I am a tech guy, my entire house is pretty much automated so this is nothing foreign to me and so if I can’t figure this app out, then the app is really bad. If I can’t get this to work, I am going to return the shades since the smart integration was the sole reason for choosing this company. Totally unacceptable considering how much the shades cost.

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.

Hubs were quite difficult to setup. Had to break down my dual band Wi-Fi network and go through the setup process like 20 times before the Hubs connected to the Wi-Fi and HomeKit. Took 6 hours over two days and 3 back and forth emails with tech support. Finally setup all my shades in the app and HomeKit. Two days later all the shades are gone from HomeKit and from the app. Setup again. Couple days later gone. Third time the shades disappeared from HomeKit but still appeared in the app but could not be controlled. Hub didn’t seem to be online even though there was a steady blue light and I could see it on the network. App kept saying hub is offline. Had to factory reset the hub. Lots of money paid for these things and I’m not happy. Tech support says the hubs are faulty but seems much more likely that their app and coding is very very poor. Cannot recommend.

Other reviewers are not exaggerating. If you are looking at this before buying, do not buy the motorized shades thinking you will automate them. You won't. You will only use the remote. And there is no way we're giving another single dollar to The Shade Store ever again. We've struggled for years with this garbage. First gen hub, second gen hub, technician visits, phone calls. It's unbelievably frustrating. I am a very technical person and this is, without question, the worst piece of technology I have ever dealt with. The hub is garbage, the app pairing and HomeKit implementation are garbage. And if after spending a whole day I finally get it working, it is sure to break again in a month or two and stay broken for months. Honestly this is beyond bad. The fact that it's this bad and the company hasn't done anything about it is a scam.

The app is completely broken. As other reviewers have noted, the app continuously deletes the shades from the apps and therefore also breaks the smart home integration. The offers by Justin to help are empty offers. Upon follow up with him directly as he requests, there is no reply, no further offer to help. It appears the responses on this platform to those unfavorable reviews are merely an attempt to obfuscate that the app does not work. Further, the technology support team has no idea how to fix the issue. Their only suggestion is to restart the devices and repair everything again. When it refuses to pair, they suggest to keep trying. This is very disappointing for shades that cost $1k each. We will never consider shade store for shades in our future homes because of this extremely poor customer service and experience.

I bought shades for the whole house- the technician who installed them tried to set up the app and failed and left it to me! I split my dual band network- “forgot the 5GHz network”, reinstalled all my computers, phone and other smart tools to the new 2.4GHz network, just to get the shade store Bridge and app to work- and it simply won’t! I went through the shade store trouble shooting videos, followed every step, to no avail- the same endless loop that happened to everybody else on this website happened to me- I have seen all the responses of the shade store development team on the app here - very laudable- but can you please just tell us what to do to fix the set up!!! I will give my feedback also to the store representatives and everybody else, that they need to stop claiming that they sell “smart shades” - they obviously do not!!

The set up in the native Shade Store v2 app is confusingly begin with. During the set up it asks you to download yet another app called Automate Pulse 2, which looks identical in functionality to the The Shade Store v2 app. Very confusing. Once I was finally able to set up the bridge/hub and all my shades in the Shade Store App, the Home App recognized all my shades. Shortly after that, all shades stop responding inside the Home app. Now every time I launch the Home app each shade’s status says “Updating” for about 2 minutes, then the status changes to the “No Response.” Strangely enough the native Shade Store app still operates the shades normally. So there’s definitely something buggy with the HomeKit communication. I expected better after spending $10k on shades. I’ve read other reviews under the Automate Pulse app that others are having the same problem.

I would give this a higher rating but the app lacks support for bugs/issues. I’ve had it working for two years now, but since the last update my blinds are randomly not getting controlled by my scenes and timers. I have done all the troubleshooting of my Wi-Fi and network (high end mesh) and location of the hub and that is not the issue as a blind will go down on schedule but then fail to go back up at the time Up is specified a few hours later. That speaks to me of bugs in your app, hub or system. The app has also randomly deleted timers or scenes or shades from timers. The link in the App Store for support is worthless as it just takes you to the shade store website which is, very sorry to say, horrible from a customer service perspective.

If I could give negative stars I would. It took unnatural gyrations to get the shades to work with the hub and remote (the secret - use the other app in the App Store by the same developer; I figured this out myself - the shade store was of no use). Since then, the shade store app works fine - but HomeKit integration has been broken. A few weeks ago - magically - the HomeKit integration started working. I did nothing - no changes, no firmware updates, no app updates. Ok, don’t question it. Well, 2 days ago it stopped again. Shade store support has been unresponsive. Short summary: Don’t get the shade store automation expecting an easy experience. And don’t get it at all unless you’re technically competent and know your way around routers and HomeKit - you’ll be on your own for setup.

is a very generous way to describe this sad excuse for an app. Pretty sure the “hub” they provide is just a piece of plastic with no actual connectivity capability. They tried blaming our router, despite the fact that it is currently seamlessly connected to five other hubs with no trouble at all. When that argument failed, they delayed yet another day promising to have someone from another one of their horrible customer “service” teams call us to waste more of our time on what would be a 10-second connection process if this product was actually functional. A total fail. If you’re thinking of ordering anything automated or otherwise from The Shade Store, just swallow a handful of broken glass instead. You’ll be more satisfied.

Our hub works okay. Sometimes it misses a scheduled event but the real issue is we can’t schedule events by sunrise/sunset. For example if I schedule an event for sunset it doesn’t trigger until 1 hour past sunset and we are unable to set the time zone (hub location). All I get when trying to set the hub location is just get a white screen. I tried on 2 iPhones and 2 iPads with the same result. I even tried to delete the app and reinstall which also didn’t work. Is there anyway to set the time zone of this hub? Maybe I’ll just setup the schedule using Home Assistant.

Saw a lot of hate here but the hubs and app have so far worked well. Hubs shipped blinking orange but I used a pen to reset and get them to blink blue. They then paired with my google mesh dual band WiFi no problem. Setting up shades was easy. Adding to google home was easy. “Hey google open my laundry room shade” works without fail - signal from hubs to shades is pretty good too. I got two hubs and they cover 3000 sqft or so without issue.

Hey Justin, instead of telling everyone to email you, why don’t you just reply to this review and explain to this audience how to connect the hub to a dual band router. The instruction manual (and another frustrated reviewer below) seems to imply that we needed to set up a “separate 2.4Ghz network”. That review doesn’t make sense to me so I will assume they’re non-technical. Is the solution to somehow disable the 5.0Ghz band from being broadcast? If so, why? And I’ve already run through all of your troubleshooting and read through all your responses and all the reviews here, so don’t tell me to call you to set up troubleshooting.

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.

I’ve had this for almost 2 years. At first, the HomeKit integration was bad. But ever since ios16, it’s been pretty good. With ios16.5, Apple fixed the bug in ios16.4 that the word “shade” was not recognized. I filed a bug report and I believed it was fixed in ios16.5. When, HomeKit works, I hardly need to use this app. Only complaint is the signal can be weak when the shade is literally 20 feet away from the hub. So it’s a hit or miss

The hubs do not work consistently and the app is unreliable. We have 12 motorized blinds with two hubs, and we have been unable to get them to work correctly. We have had multiple issues trying to connect to the hubs to the app. I’ve tried resetting the hubs, connecting only via a separate 2.4GHz WiFi, deleting and reinstalling the app, and none of these seem to work. On a recent install of new blinds the installer reconnected our blinds to the hub through a process that is not documented in the app or anywhere else on line. The next day, all the blinds (including the new ones) were deleted from the app. This is really unacceptable, considering the cost for these shades and system.

The shades are beautiful, they work great on the app. The sunset and sunrise timers are my favorite. I had the hub hanging on the wall, I realized that was causing the bedroom shade to not respond (instructions are specific “lay flat don’t put on side”). I put it flat, now all shades are working. It’s a really great system, it also works with my Alexa app. Nothing like saying “Alex open all shades” and all the windows let light in.

Everything was working well, then one day one of my hubs became unresponsive and I had to re-setup half of my shades. Then with a subsequent iOS update, all grouped shades stopped to work reliably, meaning that when I try to raise or lower the 2 to 4 shades in a group only a fraction of the shades responded. This also meant all automations I had setup ceased to function and has made it difficult to use the system at all. Each shade has to be triggered manually and the rest of my family cannot figure it out. Please inform when a fix will be issued.

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.

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.

Then last week it stopped connecting to network. Tried everything documented and it connects to HomeKit but app cannot connect to the device. Shade store support had been useless. $25k in shades that now don’t work as advertised. Not happy. Update: if the message from this VP of products was sincere he’d reach out to us directly. Pasting a form letter in won’t do it. I reached out to your support again last week (on your advice mr VP) and got no response. Anyone read this save your frustration and buy Lutron if you want automation

This is the most frustrating wifi device ive ever used. I’ll have the hub, devices (shades), rooms, and scenes all setup perfectly and it will work for a week or so, the. It will randomly stop working. Sometimes rebooting the hub works but often I’ll have to reconfigure/re-detect everything from scratch which takes at least 30 minutes (and I’m an engineer and have basically memorized the process). Shades work fine with remote but hub and app are total trash.

We just bought shades for an entire room (not cheap) and I wish I’d read these review before we made that choice. This app, well, doesn’t work. As other reviewers mentioned, the hub can be added to homekit just fine, but trying to connect the hub in the app is a fools errand. Frankly, I am uncertain why the shade store decided they needed to put an app in between the shades and the hub, zigbee doesn’t require it. At any rate, we wanted shades we could control with homekit and these aren’t it. Bummer.

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.

I cannot get the hub to work with the app. Literally fails connection every single time despite me isolating the 2.4 network and following all instructions. I have been trying this for hours and the result is always the same. After looking at the reviews, I feel like a fool. I have no idea why they even have this product because it doesn’t work. The shade store should be ashamed that they sell such expensive products and this is what they have for an app.

This app and hub is an utter disappointment! First I had to get someone to configure as a separate 2.4 Ghz wifi network on my dual band router just for this hub! My tech person said this was the only hub he had encountered that had this requirement. Then i found that i had to move this hub out of the cabinet where i have all of my electronics, including my Hue hub, because the hub couldn’t connect to one of the rooms in my condo. Then one of the shades stopped working with the Apple Home after working earlier in the day. And all of the names of rooms in which i have shades are screwed up on Apple Home. And all of this one Day 1! Calling the Shade Store tomorrow morning to get my money back. This app and hub is a joke. I only wish i had read the numerous negative reviews of this app before I purchased it.

I was incredibly excited to hear The Shade Store would work with Homekit however the connection has been completely unstable and has only work part of the time. Most of the time my shades are ‘not responding’ and cannot be controlled. Recently I tried to reset the hub and found out thy cannot even be found in their own app (this one.) Not sure what to do here at this point as I, as many people on here, have invested quite a bit of money for automation only to be disappointed.

I’ve had all my shades and blinds disappear from the app three times now. We have 12 blinds. I’m reluctant to program them all again because this keeps happening. We wanted to add another 2 blinds and I just give up right now. The second time my shades disappeared a tech was scheduled to come out, only to place a phone call to tech support… who just walked me through the setup process. When I pressed for an answer why this keeps happening, neither of them had any clue. Shade Store is a premium priced product. I paid extra for it and their version 2 hub for smart phone integration. What I’ve actually got is… useless. I’ve reached out for more support and would happily change my review if the bug and problem were fixed, but reading other’s reviews… I’m not hopeful.

The hab’s have been working great for me for a few years but recently some newly added blinded keep unpairing after a while. Update: the developer also reached out via email. For now a reboot seems to have fixed the issues.

The Shade store is absolute trash from beginning to end, and this app perfectly matches how incredibly terrible the company is. This app has been one star since the day it was released and never is it ever fixed. Unfortunately by the time one reaches the point of downloading this app, you’ve already spent thousands of dollars on your shades having no idea the crap you’re about to deal with in this app. Sorry everyone, they got your $ and they just don't care.

Works great! Nice and simple. I had a small issue with initial set up but reached out to customer service and someone did a virtual walk through with me and got it all up and running in a couple of minutes. Highly recommend!

This app is super glitchy and needs a ton of work. Twice now its deleted my all devices/shades I’ve added for no reason. I have to go back in an add every single one each time because it just decides the number of shades i have in every room is suddenly zero. Half the time the shades won’t even work with the app when it is reading. And i have an extender for it too. No response from support either. I’d be careful with this one

Beautiful shades, but the app doesn’t work as promised. In only a few months I’ve had to make multiple service calls for the app deleting my shades from the room or for shades randomly going offline when I don’t have an internet outage anywhere in my house. I am sick of calling technicians out to my house to attempt to fix shoddy technology. You’re better off going with cheaper shades with an app interface that actually works.

Finally got around to putting shades in newly constructed home. Opted for battery op motors to control all of my solars shades. All Programmed through app. Super easy to use and well- designed. Even have living room windows programmed to keep furniture from fading!! Great product and excellent app!

I’m not able to make my scene timers happen at sunrise and sunset. Only able to set timers to happen at a certain clock time like 6:00PM every day. So I have to adjust the timer everyday as the days get longer and my furniture is getting hit with evening sun. Would be easy to add sunrise/sunset into the the timer functions. Until that happens, 1-star for this app! Many other smart home apps have sunset / sunrise features built into app. You would think luxury brand Shade Store could do this too?!

Update:Do you even read the reviews or just cut and paste a response?!? Previous review: Are you kidding! I have to buy something else to make my blinds work on a schedule?!? What kind of kickbacks are you getting for this?!? I bought these so I could schedule them for my wheelchair-bound mother and now you force an upgrade that makes us have to spend more money! I was going to buy more shades, but not ever again!

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?

Buyer beware: I would not consider this to be a truly integrated HomeKit app. My devices are responsive less than 30% of the time, and they offer little in the way of technical support (the advice is basically “try disconnecting and reconnecting the hub over and over “). My experience seems to be in-line with the majority of users, as you can see with the other negative reviews here. I don’t recommend paying extra to enable WiFi.

Hub would not work using a repeater. It has to connect directly to the router. We finally got it working fine then for some reason the app just dropped all our hubs and devices as if they have not been set up. Then it keeps logging us out. You only stay logged in for a few minutes before it asks you to login again. Very frustrating!

Do you need to turn off 5 GHz Wi-Fi in order to even pair the system. Some mesh routers and Internet cable providers make this very difficult. Even after turning it off, the compatibility between HomeKit and the new app made it impossible to pair. Tried all the different ways, the tech came out and could not get it to work either. Very frustrating

One day my shades didn’t open automatically, so I checked my Apple Home app to see what might have happened. Strangely enough, they had disappeared entirely (not even visible as offline). When I opened the shade store app, all of the shades in my hose were completely gone, and the rooms said they have 0 devices. Awful product considering how much money this costs.

Ive spent over 3-4 hours over 3 days trying to connect this hub. Ive never had this much trouble setting up a hub in my life. Spent $3K on shades only bc i was told i could control remotely thru my phone, Alexa and set up schedules. Would never have bought this if i knew how garbage this hub set up and app is. What a friggin joke. I should be compensated for the hours ill never get back wasted on this.

This app and the associated hub couldn’t be a more frustrating experience. Buggy to connect to wifi. Takes forever to set up, and every shade must be added individually, and then it randomly dumps all of the shades from the app and recognizes no devices. This is supposed to sync with apple Home, but it works no more than 5% of the time.

Whatever they did recently it’s completely broken, hun no longer see/remembers any of my blinds. Then trying to set it up again is a nightmare, see the hub but then get a communication error when trying to connect to it. This has to be THE most useless router ever made, with no support or help available. If I had to use one word…..RUN!!

The professional installers spent over 1.5 hours trying to get the app to recognize even one of my three shades. They even called the Shade Store’s pro help line . Everything they recommended we tried multiple times still didn’t recognize the shades. App really needs to be reworked, right now it’s inoperative and even the professionals can’t make it work.