Smart Home Manager 4+

My daughter and husband were developing a bad habit of being glued to their screens more and more lately. It wasn't healthy and it wasn't good for our family. I saw their physical, and mental health start to suffer, as well as their loss of interest in hobbies, activities, anything but those screens! Once I started pausing the internet to get their attention, there was some initial push back, but when they realized how much they were overreacting to merely being asked to put down their phone/tablet to simply have dinner as a family, they saw how bad they had gotten. We agreed to some limits and we're back to getting our own stuff done and enjoying family time as well. It's been very helpful. It's also shown us that we aren't getting any unauthorized use either, which my husband has been worried about since getting some "smart home" items. It is nice to be able to check on that.

When I check to see the list of how many devices are connected to my network, I can tell it’s not accurate 99% of the time. It does show that at one point there may have been 13 connected but I know for a fact that there’s only 3 or 4 later on at times powered on and connected and some have even been completely powered off for literally weeks, or even months and they'll still show up as connected. I also can’t help but to think that it still does have an effect on how fast the connection is despite a vast majority of the devices not connected and completely powered off. For example, an old iPhone 5 or 10 year old Xbox 360 does not have the capability of being technically powered off, but still has the ability to be connected to WiFi (standby mode); yet the connected devices list will still show either one or both still connected for weeks or up to months on end until I turn whatever device on and then turn it back off. It seems like the only real fix on my end is to turn, whatever is not actually on and connected to my network, on and then power it back off. It’s ridiculous that that’s what I’d have to do to make me feel like it showing the number of devices connected is slowing my connection down late at night when internet traffic is at its least giving me the best of its capability. This has been going on for months now but now it’s just getting annoying if anything to be honest. Please look into a fix for this issue.

There were devices that popped up on my WiFi band that I do not have. I was able to block them and get faster network. In the past I had gotten hacked through my home WiFi and it destroyed the WiFi box and my iPhone. I had no idea there were computers and gamers in there until there was no WiFi signal at all. I have teenage sons who love video games. I feel they are safer now that I can set times they have access to the WiFi and when they don’t, keeping them from being targets for hackers. Smart Home Manager really comes in handy on school nights. Now my children get sleep, do their chores to earn internet time because they can’t sneak on the WiFi late at night. I give 5 stars because if I didn’t have this app on my devices those devices I blocked would probably have cost me another phone and very possibly my identity by now. Not to mention the rest of my households devices.