In terms of monitoring a refrigerator, this app has a couple of missing features that take it from a really useful adjunct to the LG refrigerator down to a sort of nice to have provider of extra information. There are three useful things an app could do: show energy usage, monitor the current temperature, and monitor whether a door is open. This app does a good job on the energy usage but fails on the temperature and door monitoring. For door monitoring, it will keep track of how often the doors are opened over a day (which is handy for figuring how to reduce energy usage). Better would be to also show total door-open time. And while it will send an alert if a door has been open for longer than some threshold (like one minute), the real failing is that it won’t report the state of the door NOW, even after an alert has been sent. So there’s no direct way to tell if a door left open was closed after a couple of minutes or if it’s still open hours later with all the frozen foods melting. For temperature, all it says is that the refrigerator and/or freezer temps are “well maintained” which presumably means that over time the temperatures are staying close to the set points. But sometimes I’d really like to know what the actual temperature is RIGHT NOW; the app simply doesn’t provide that.

LG has changed the app so that it's difficult for those of us with visual impairments to change the temperature on a dryer. It used to be that you click temperature, and then you could choose your setting. Now, it gives us a slider that doesn't work with a screen reader, and backward controls that tell us to push up for down and down for up, and it doesn't tell us what it's set for so we have to go out of that and then back into it to change it some more. It was much more efficient when trying to do it the other way, where you clicked it, it gave you all the options for your temperature setting, you pressed it, and moved onto the next thing. Then setting the time is impossible. I have two choices now, one hour and 40 minutes, or 40 minutes. It gives me all the times that I can choose, zero through one for the hour and one through I think 59 for the minutes, but if I try to choose anything other than one hour, it won't change. It doesn't change by the minute either. The zero and the one for the hours work, but all the minutes don't. I can choose one minute, or zero minutes, and it's still stuck at 40 minutes. We paid a small fortune for this washer and dryer because I need something that's accessible, and LG keeps forgetting about those of us who need accessibility and changing it to be less accessible.

Why a multinational corporation, in the 21st century, would develop such an incredibly powerless app for what I can only guess is a half-baked attempt to put Smart in their product marketing and that is all. The potential in having an app like this that could do soooooo many things things and it is reduced to a counter to “remind you” to buy soap. Once can set up, start, end, or even view the dishwasher status unless it is physically turned on. And don’t even get me started on the actual machine’s capabilities, or lack there of because I was only dumb enough not to return it before the return window closed. The machine itself works like them all. Cleans most dishes, not all. You still need to pre wash and soak. But the fact I have to push start AND close the door in 4 seconds or I have to do it again is almost as if the machine was designed by a government agency determined to make the user experience as painful as possible. If you are so bad at buying soap then this is your app. If you want it to tell you when it’s done, it will do that, but every person needs the app and who’s turn is it to unload? Well, would be great if it could do that, but it can’t. A fairly simple task can’t be achieved because LG blocks that status of “done” from actioning any other event. That means you can’t trigger it to do what you want to do because they won’t let you. That is just a waste.