I don't get it.

Harmony One is getting great reviews. But my experience of this remote so far, and of the 1000 I bought a year ago, is this:

You can put hours of work into customizations. Then, you make a small tweak - say, add a button to an activity - or Harmony makes a software update - and POOF! your finely honed work turns into a big pile of poo because some activity or device no longer works.

My experience of Harmony's customer service is "gee, we apologize...it looks like your activity / device got corrupted...try programming it again" - which you have to do FROM SCRATCH. (Add the device or activity, remove all of their defaults, put in your own).

Wait, let's see...the remote isn't doing what I've customized it to do, so you want me to repeat all that work in the hope that this time it will work the way it was supposed to the first time? Like, this time it will be "benevolent" instead of "corrupt"?

My current example of this fun is that I have a Listen to Music activity where the device (a Squeezebox) isn't "punching through" at all. Meaning none of the device buttons in the activity work (in fact the soft buttons don't even show up). Meaning, the remote doesn't do what is clearly on screen in the software.

Forget about how kludgy the software is - I'm talking about STABILITY. Basic quality control. How does my programming "get corrupted"? I'll tell you how - your software is complete crap!

The only way I can understand that these remotes are so popular is that most people just take the default Harmony Activity and Device programming, and don't tweak, and for them, it works. For anyone who tweaks - even if it's something as simple as moving the "Subtitle" button from Page 2 to Page 1 of your Watch a DVD activity - you just never know when a rock is going to fall from the sky onto your remote.

Appreciate any commiseration or suggestions.

The amalgamated Harmony Software tends to be unstable for new products like the "1000" and the "One" (teething phase), but quite stable for older products (like my 659 and 680). This is compounded when you create workaround(s) "outside the box". The last time I had a major upheaval with my 659/680 is when Harmony Software replaced the activity device columns by a single device column. I had to redo my activity clone technique single key macros, with the new activity sequence feature.

Thanks for that jlet - it implies that things will get better.

I also have some offsetting observations - customer service has been better than I expected. I did get told at first, "try reprogramming," but when I told them that didn't work, they did the reprogramming themeselves. Which mostly fixed the situation (not entirely - now, if I change the power-on order from default, one of my activities stops working). So I'm hopeful that if I'm persistent but patient, I'll get it done.

Funny, I guess it's almost like having a custom-installer remote and having to go back to them to program it. Annoying, but a lot cheaper.

Remember that a large portion your paid for the remote is for support. The customers are also part of their support team. Their business model uses the customers to initiate entries in the database, Quality Control (returning defective units), and beta testing for fancy new models (as you have experienced). Clever!

On a One I've set up 17 Activities using 11 Devices and have regularly made adjustments, a whole of lot of them, and have never had that experience - the changes downloaded to the remote without a failure.
Suggestions for your very different experience: a faulty remote, or a faulty internet connection.

I thought of the faulty remote - Harmony doesn't think so.

Also this was my experience with the 1000. Intenet connection issue seems unlikely to me.

Curiously and humorously, the device that is causing my One grief is...Squeezebox, a Logitech product.