PowerView

This app will control your H-D PV Gen3 shades just fine, but the app for sure will drain the battery of any iPhone or iPad that you use for this application. The app somehow violates the "background app refresh" setting and runs in the background, consuming your battery, until the battery runs out. This behavior is tested/proven on a brand new iPhone 16 Pro, an iPhone 14 Pro, and an iPad Pro. Device and OS version does not matter…you can avoid the battery drain only by swiping the app out of memory (like from your app carousel) after each use. I have explained to H-D developers, but they do not perform their own tests and refuse to admit there is a problem. Today, I just noticed my iPad battery drained to almost nothing after charging it recently, and when you study Battery Usage, it showed 19min "Screen On," 22hr 3min "Screen Off," and the Powerview app showed 22hr and 21min of battery usage. I have a lot of other apps open in the background (Outlook, Google Maps, etc), and they all show less than 5 mins of battery usage. A day or so ago, I forgot to swipe the PV app closed after opening it for 1 minute, and there you have it…the app consumed over 22 hr of my battery despite the app being in the background and having the iPadOS background app refresh turned off. Absolutely horrible…it is doing something in the background and consuming battery…it’s even more unusual because Apple claims that apps cannot “run” in the background when background app refresh is turned off, yet this app certainly chews up energy doing something. I urge Apple developers to see if this "background app refresh" behavior is normal, and I urge H-D developers to please fix it.

When in doubt, change all of your batteries in the wands even if the low battery indicator isn’t recognized by the app. That features pretty much useless. Also, not sure the default Remote Connect version of the app that opens that indicates it works most functions if connected to a wireless connection does since - Remote Connect does absolutely nothing. 100% unresponsive. Why promote this? My blinds have always been connected to my wireless and I’m signed into my account. There should be clear language to differentiate that mode or just get rid of it - because it’s total garbage. You end up having to reboot the app a few times to get the full version. Yeah, you know the one that actually functions if it’s in the mood and the batteries are running. Two takeaways for developers: fix the low battery indicator or get rid of it, and just tell people to change their batteries seasonally. Second, let’s label Remote Connect (not just a banner) and add a toggle to get rid of it so it doesn’t open as the default which doesn’t even operate anyways. The only mode I want on my phone app is the one that works most often. I shouldn’t have to reboot and fuss with a $20K-$30K product. I spend way more time messing with the automated blinds than I do any of the manual ones. I can only imagine if Remote Connect worked, and you were operating this offsite how knotted strings would be, motor overwhelmed until something broke. I would never use this feature if it ever worked unsupervised so basically, it’s still useless and untrustworthy. Won’t unknowingly be a beta tester for HD again much less a tester for other consumers. I should have been compensated.

I have had 11 Hunter-Douglas PowerView shades for the past 4 months, and added a 12th just last week. I’m an app developer, and I’ve been impressed with everything Hunter-Douglas got right: the UI is especially intuitive, and for the most part, the app and especially the shades have been rock-solid reliable. However — there’s a continuing issue with the app occasionally not setting the scene data in the hub correctly. It appears as if the scene data can somehow get corrupted between creating/modifying a scene, and then transmitting that scene data to be stored in the hub. This issue was verified when Hunter-Douglas’ superb support technician guided me to slightly change the scene data, causing it to be written out to the hub again. That solved my problem. As an app developer it appears to be an initialization or corruption issue, which could be tracked down by embedding more data validation into the app. I might suggest the data be checksummed and the checksum be stored both in the app and on the hub. That way, any degradation of data could be automatically detected and perhaps the issue could be found and corrected. All that said, the above issue is mostly a temporary frustration: the product has been a pleasure to work with, and now that HomeKit is supported, I can ask Siri to invoke any scene.