This is long but important (representation of the community sentiment)
The most frustrating part about this certificate breakdown, and the broader, years-long lack of official Home Assistant support, is (as a business owner and business consultant myself) watching a classic business blind spot play out in real time.
When Wyze leadership looks at metrics, they see the Home Assistant and self-hosted hobbyist crowd as a tiny, possibly single-digit or low double digit percentage of their total user base. From a pure spreadsheet perspective, it’s easy for them to justify prioritizing features for the “mass market” user who only owns one or a couple app-connected cameras.
But that logic completely misses the concept of the Force Multiplier User.
Hobbyists, power users, and Home Assistant coordinators are the most influential segment of the smart home market. We are the tech support for our families, the neighborhood consultants, and the content creators making the very comparison videos that prospective buyers watch before clicking “Add to Cart.”
Most people here know that I have obviously been one of Wyze’s biggest champions. I’m a volunteer here, and my own home is practically a showroom for almost every device Wyze has ever manufactured. Hundreds of them. It used to be that when people visited, saw my setup (which includes really cool automations including fully automated lighting inside my house and other such things with Wyze as my PRIMARY ecosystem), and asked for advice on building out their own smart homes, 90% of them would walk away choosing Wyze.
Today? That number has flipped, despite my huge influence of what I do personally (Wyze is still my primary with hundreds of devices which should make an impact on persuading them, but fewer and fewer walk away deciding it is the best option for them now).
Now, when friends, family, or clients ask for recommendations, I have to be candid about the long-term roadmap. If they want to expand their ecosystem down the road, Or be able to do advanced automations, Wyze simply doesn’t scale with them with what they are planning:
- Ecosystem Gaps: Wyze doesn’t offer core hardware pieces like dedicated smart buttons, leaving huge blind spots if you try to stay entirely in-network. They have too many smart home gaps to be your primary or only ecosystem for a smart home. They did this to themselves starting in 2023 When they decided they were going to deprioritize any smart home expansion and focus solely on cameras. This made it impossible for a lot of people to be able to consider them as their primary smart home platform.
- Automation Limitations: The native rules engine lacks basic conditional logic (IF/AND/OR/NOT) or wait states, not to mention sequential execution of actions, and other basic things
- Lack of Interoperability: No official Home Assistant integration, no native RTSP (technically now limited RTSP to a couple devices), and no local control options (everything is cloud dependent instead of cloud enhanced). Most of their primary like-kind competitors support all of these things and it’s killing them.
- Once people realize they can’t tie their ecosystem together, close to 90% of them choose a competitor like Reolink or others right out of the gate even if they don’t need interoperability right now.
Some people still leave my house and decide Wyze is perfect for what they intend, but 90% decide it has a lot of gaps that will cause larger issues with their goals in the long term compared to other options, even though I personally choose Wyze for my primary. It’s killing them.
Look through the comments just in this thread or the home assistant wishlist thread and the related ones. Long-time, loyal customers, including many who actually pay for Cam Plus subscriptions are actively auditing their setups, canceling services, and replacing their hardware because they need reliability and local interoperability.
It really frustrates me knowing that when Wyze execs see subscription churn or sales dips, they will likely attribute it to macroeconomic factors or broad market shifts. They won’t see the silent drain: the thousands of potential new customers who never bought a single Wyze camera because the advanced user they sought advice from steered them away, Or simply asked them “if” questions about their medium to long-term goals and they decided for themselves that it was smarter to do something else.
Treating the advanced community as a “niche hobby” is actively killing referrals and damaging brand reputation among the very people who built the foundation of Wyze’s word-of-mouth growth. Fixing the certificate issue is a temporary band-aid. Providing stable, open connection points like an official Home Assistant integration is how Wyze stops the bleeding.
And it wouldn’t hurt to start expanding their smart home so there are fewer ecosystem gaps that force people to go to competitors to fill those gaps, which only leads their customers to absolutely need interoperability, which then leads them to realize they can’t meet their needs with Wyze. I understand why they decided they wanted to drop product expansion from everything but cameras, but when that is applied with their other policy situation, together, it’s killing them and driving The most influential people away.
This post is fairly representative to what I’m explaining here:
@raym64 posted some similar explanations and clarifications about this in another thread as well
Here is a very long time loyal customer and respectful forum user with several Wyze devices who even pays subscriptions to Wyze who says I don’t even use home assistant that much except for a few critical scripts and automations that Wyze just doesn’t support [natively] themselves So they had to look elsewhere for a workaround to get that to work for them and to meet their needs even though they don’t really use home assistant or other stuff. But Wyze not only doesn’t support them being able to do the automations they need to do with their Wyze devices, but when they found a workaround solution to be able to do it, now Wyze is breaking that for them too. He may end up having no alternative but to consider giving up and cancelling the subscription and moving on to something that won’t be such a fight To get their devices to just do what he wants them to do. (Thanks for your comment @raym64 I’ve always enjoyed our interactions over the years. You’re an awesome guy I highly respect)
This is the thing I’ve been trying to get them to understand for the last few years. They’re shooting themselves in the foot and blaming it on other metrics or macroeconomic variables or something with a big blind spot on what’s actually going on, or at the very least the kind of reality they could have if they were open to listen to their most influential users and expanded the vision a little bit.
I watch a lot of comparison videos for cameras and other things, and I can’t count how many I have recently seen emphatically tell people that they should probably avoid Wyze due to limited home assistant support, which they are almost definitely going to want or need as they expand to fill in the gaps (hardware, automation, and feature gaps).
Fixing the certificate issue should be a minimum level of effort IMO, particularly for a company who has made a ton of effort in the last 2 years to correct their public perception on taking security seriously. It is not a good look to continue using a deprecated certificate that the industry as a whole has declared (with lots of advanced warning) to no longer meet the minimum standards.
I wish there was an easier way to help the execs understand how their decisions are affecting the overall KPIs that they are focused on, But aren’t measuring some things that are critically important and influential to those stats. It affects all of them, new sales funnels, retention, even subscriptions, etc (at the very least fewer people joining Wyze in favor of competitors, some of whom would have signed up for the Wyze subscriptions, and MANY people are actively steered away from Wyze even though Wyze PERFECTLY matches their use-case for what they want and what they would use if for…Wyze would be perfect for LOTS of people, but they watch an influencer or talk to a hobbiest neighbor or family member who convinces them to go elsewhere even though Wyze would be perfect for the newbie who doesn’t need the advanced stuff simply because Wyze isn’t fitting for the advanced influential person who is trying to expand and grow).
I have tried to share this type of analysis with Wyze employees to represent the community to the best that I can on behalf of all of you, but I don’t think my points [on this particular topic] are taken As seriously as they merit. However, I will keep trying. And I will keep relaying things on behalf of community members to the best I am able. Know that I am supportive. It does help to have other people give their own voice on these things that I can actually reference instead of it being easy to dismiss things as me speaking solely on behalf of myself. So, thank you to everybody who does share their voice [respectfully] on this matter. It is helpful, at the very least to give me the ability to reference that there are a number of other people posting these things themselves about how it is affecting them and why they should honestly consider things without relying on my voice alone.
It can be helpful. For example, the only reason Wyze finally ended up doing dark mode or started working on rtsp on some cameras, is because so many people were giving their voice on how much they wanted these things and how important they were, so they finally started prioritizing them… At least until people stop talking about them, and then they seemed to slow down a lot when it seemed like the engagement on those issues began to wane (To be fair, they are still working on rtsp and just announced that rtsp for the V4 should be released by the end of the month). So yes, engagement on certain topics and sharing your voice does make a difference for important things to not be easily dismissed as small edge case matters.
Hopefully some of the higher ups take the time to read this and some of your respectful feedback. I will try to keep doing what I can to support these efforts with the limited extra access I have available. 