| Dark mode on Android and iOS |
We are working on these features already, initially for the camera live view screens, camera group, and HMS/CPT camera screens. We are aiming for as early as 2.43 but sometimes delays can happen. -u/WyzeMaximK |
| "App Engineering Question for Maxim Komleu: Wyze users are frequently told about some App wishlist requests that some things we ask for aren’t easy to program/implement due to “the way the app is structured,” and that to implement some of them would require waiting for a whole rewrite of the app from the ground up to implement several of these requests. Can you elaborate for us on what makes this so difficult compared to other apps so that some things just aren’t possible or as easy to do right now as some other people with programming experience have thought it should be? What kind of design debt is causing these limitations? How is it structured differently than you would like? |
It is not just engineering question, but also reasonability, marketing, and so on. Sometimes, it is not a problem to implement something, but it conflicts with company projections or conflicts with other features and deadlines for them. As an example, we were receiving a lot of requests for dark mode support. We finally did that, but before the release we needed to work on other more critical problems. - u/WyzeMaximK |
| “Also along these lines, knowing if there are hurdles from the backend architecture/infrastructure vs the way the Wyze app has been built to manage so many devices over time vs having multiple apps. The only secondary app is the Wyze Car app and that might be because it was originally “just” an April Fools joke product but became real later on after seeing continued interest. Are microservices being used or planned for to improve development processes?” |
In terms of back-end technical architecture, we have adopted a technical framework of microservices. However, this will not improve our hardware development speed. But we will try to speed up from the hardware development process. - u/WyzeMJ |
| “To put some of the other Dark mode comments in the form of an AMA relevant question for you, Cofounder Dave Crosby publicly shared in this Facebook thread 3 months ago that Wyze was working on the design process to convert the Camera UI for all the other cameras to DarkMode now, without having to wait for an entire rewrite of the app. He even showed us a prototype of the progress you have made. Firstly, thank you for working on this! We really appreciate it! Related to the above prototype example, Dave said, There’s a number of surprisingly difficult technical challenges to this, but we’ve started the design process. Still scoping it out. Since this is your field of expertise, can you tell us more about what the technical challenges are to this that he was referring to? He said you have started the design process (again, thank you). Since you are probably the most familiar with what this is going to take to get it done, can you tell us any [non-binding] estimates or hopes on what you are personally thinking of for a rough timeline? We acknowledge things could work out better than you expect, or there could be other weird obstacles that arise, but it would be nice to have some kind of estimate based on how much work you’ve already put in to figure out how easy it would be to finish now. He also said “Still scoping it out,” and I am wondering what that implies. Does that mean that you are unsure IF it can reasonably be done in the current app build, or whether he just mean scoping out in the sense of still unsure HOW LONG it is going to take?” |
The problem is that adding theme management into the entire app was not expected at the initial stage of app development. And even when the app was starting development, Apple had not released the functionality yet. It’s always more complicated to update something that is already working. We have to think about the current user experience, keep it untouched, avoid regressions, and place something more on top of the current implementation. But we are working on it. We have a solution for the problem and we’re targeting the 2.43 release. Of course, the initial release will not be able to cover all UX. But it’s a start, and we will continue working to bring a comprehensive user experience. - u/WyzeMaximK |
| "For both the App and the Firmware teams. In a letter, the Founders said the following: in 2023, because this year, much like our first year in business, will be the year of the CAMERA. With your help, we will revisit everything about the Wyze Cam experience. We will focus hard on hearing all your feedback and making the best camera hardware and software in existence. Product launches in 2023 will also be focused on cameras, with few exceptions. Get ready for some big camera announcements in just a few weeks! And we will of course continue to support and update all Wyze products. With that context in mind, please answer the following: What efforts have you made toward these goals so far this year that most added to that, and what we can expect for the second half of the year? What feedback are you hearing loud and clear from users related to your team’s particular responsibilities or area of influence? |
Soon the app teams will be releasing many improvements and fixes to make apps more efficient, We are working on several high demand features (frequently asked by users) which we will try to release this summer and early autumn. The application is the business card of the company, this is the first thing that the user sees and starts using, because of that, the app team was working hard and we still have a lot of work to do to make the app look and operate better, we constantly are researching new features, and improving current functionalities, we are carefully monitoring user feedback to satisfy most of our users. The app is one big system, we can not make something specific working well and forget about rest of the functionalities, e.g. if we do dark mode, we do it across all app, if we do landscape we do for whole app and so on. - u/WyzeMaximK |
| “Maybe for Maxim or Mingjun. I find that the app layout is still very primitive. I find it hard to use, as someone who has tons of Wyze devices. Why is this not being addressed? (since, like, the start?) It seems like a UX and usability expert can solve this issue. Also, just the frontend in general. Do you not have resources for this? Just asking, from one engineer to another. asking this specifically as this is my field. e.g. why can’t i group doorbells and cameras? or why does the app always requires a cache clean on both app level and device level (because it says offline on thumbnail), or why does it not scale well on bigger devices?” |
We are working on the problem and are gradually on improving the usability of the app. We have gathered a lot of user feedback and accumulated tons of data. Currently, we are focusing on Home and Event page layout, especially for adopting landscape layout, and we are also working on dark mode because it is the most requested feature. We are redesigning the UI and this can be found initially on new incoming products and later in the year we will adopt the new UI for older products. - u/WyzeMaximK |
| “What are the challenges to providing app or firmware fixes for items which seem to be relatively simple? Like allowing the grouping of different devices in a group. Individuals would like to label things as Living Room, Family Room, etc. Why do some of the things like this take so long?” |
We are typically pretty quick to fix these simple things in the Beta environment, but “simple” fixes typically create silly bugs, at least from my experience. (See my previous post about the WPA3 breakage!). There are a lot of legacy reasons for our slow cadence in regard to the production firmware… The 10.x release was essentially a complete rewrite of the code, which meant that the tiny fixes that could have been made to 9.x took forever to get into production. This is changing though!! 10.x is out! The weight has been lifted! Our release cadence will not only increase going forward, but also include smaller changes that should cause less breakage - u/WyzeMitchell |
Notice the dark mode.