GROHE Watersystems 4+

To get this to work as intended, I had to try five times, remove my home and room, and reconfigure everything again and again.

There are so many issues. The names of the device types don't match the names of the devices as marketed in the US (e.g., Grohe Blue 2.0 vs. Pro).

Adding the device also reconfigures it, so if you have things up and running using the display on the device, it resets whatever you did, losing usage data, etc.

The add wizard the first time has you create a home and room but doesn’t mandate specifying the country. This is a problem because the store option doesn’t work if you don’t specify the country, and you can’t edit it afterward.

After deleting the home to reset it, the old devices get orphaned. In my case, I have five devices that are in an error state and dissociated from the configured home, and they can’t be removed.

Beyond that, the app is essentially useless beyond reading filter age and canister state, but it appears to be unrelated to the data displayed on the device. It’s like someone said, "Have an app," without even considering what it would be used for.

More generally, it has the distinct feeling of a third-party-developed application by people who didn’t even have a device or understand its use cases.

I don’t know why they even bothered with an app. Between the near impossibility of getting it on the network (which I was able to do by setting up an actual separate non-mesh router with 5Ghz fully disabled), to the ever present “you may have an issue with your device” message, it’s a dumpster fire. For the very brief period I actually had this working a number of months ago, the “smart” features (like setting up an automated pour of a specifically volume of water) never worked right.

I would caution anyone from ever buying a product from Grohe that is intended to be smart. Buy it if you like the hardware and the hardware alone. The software is less than an afterthought — it’s simply a way to check the box that they made this “smart” and can charge us dummies extra for it.

After any overly complex setup/login process, it just gets stuck spinning forever after you give it the password to your WiFi. Tried several times, including deleting the app. But the water is good.