A pile-on for homekit!
This is the part that worries me – all it will take is for some cheap Chinese made camera maker to integrate HomeKit into their product, and WYZE will fall by the wayside. Someone in mainland China will realize the economic promise of HomeKit, and will jump on this.
Once that happens, WYZE will have lost their potential advantage.
This is a serious question - what will it take to make this happen? Do you (WYZE) need more money? Should we start a GoFundMe or KickStarter campaign to show financial support for this?
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For those of you who are pretty technical, it is now possible to bring Wyze Cams into HomeKit as motion sensors with the stock firmware. Here is how I did it:
- Installed homebridge
- Installed homebridge-sqs plugin
- Created an FIFO SQS queue in Amazon Web Services
- Created an extremely simple AWS Lambda function that is exposed as a HTTP-based webhook using the AWS API Gateway (I use the Zappa framework for this).
- Configured each Wyze Cam in my house as a motion sensor in my homebridge configuration file, and also configured the SQS plugin with the appropriate credentials
- Created IFTTT automations which ping my webhook when motion is detected on each camera, passing the proper data.
The webhook receives events from IFTTT, pushes messages to the SQS queue, which in turn triggers homebridge via the plugin, and sets the appropriate motion detected state. It works well, but not as quickly as I’d like.
I would love to see Wyze actually make this happen for me! If I can do it in an hour or so with hacks like this, I have faith that your team can do a first-class HomeKit integration!
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I like it.
Integration would allow for building a more robust security option without needing to use Honeywell or other high cost solutions. Use of the camera to identify movement in the scene and ideally differentiate between people and animals.
Xiaomi Dafang in mainland China and Europe, NEOS Smartcam in UK and Wize Cam V2 in North America they are all the same. Hopefully the Wyze software will be a differentiator and assure that all our Data stays ours. This is why I use only Homekit compatible devices and stay away from Amazon Alexa and Google Home who are to happy to listen to us and sale our personal data. I also use HomeCam and Homebridge to integrate non Homekit compatible devices and service like IFTTT for at least two homes. It works but I would rather prefer to stay inside only Apple eco-system for security. Considering the you looking into Sense products and others you could make a blast in the market if your products were Apple compatible. Some companies have their product compatible with the 3 eco-systems and some others have different products line for each. Either ways would work for me. I am counting on you Wyze guys!
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In case you missed it, Wyze did a video Q&A session a while ago. The subject of this Roadmap topic was addressed in the video. Here’s a link to the video and an index of the content so you can jump directly to the part that addresses this Roadmap topic.
0:40 Outdoor Cam (Dongsheng)
2:15 Wyze Sense (Mike)
2:52 Beyond Security Products (Mike)
3:30 Become International Company (Yun)
4:25 Simultaneous Streaming (Tao)
5:05 Improvements to Playback (Bugs, Fast Forward) (Tao)
5:50 RTSP (Frederick)
7:10 Google Home/Assistant (Frederick)
7:40 Apple Homekit (Frederick)
8:35 Google Integration Demo (Frederick)
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any specific reason for considering this as a low priority item. As someone mentioned, integration with Apple HomeKit is really a big market and lot of $$$.
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Please add HomeKit integration. This would be a real unique feature and definitely push Wyze Cam popularity.
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I would love to early order your new door sensors and motion sensors but, honestly, if I won’t be able to integrate with my other homekit products then I need a different platform. Heart breaker. Total heart breaker.
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Adding my vote for HomeKit! It’s not critical for the cameras (but it would be nice); however, it’s a dealbreaker for us for the motion and contact sensors. We’d love to see it!
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Voted. Add HomeKit
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+1 Please add HomeKit
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Yes!!! I am also up-voting home kit integration. Wyze cam feels like an Apple product. This would definitely be a huge draw to many.
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I just voted, even up to $50, I will get 5 immediately as long as it will work with HomeKit
Well, since they killed it and are considering Apple Homekit support to be a low priority, WYZE is now dead to me, and I will consider them to be an extremely low-priority product.
Anybody want to buy 5 cheap Wyzecams?
Where did they say they are not going to do HomeKit, I thought it was still maybe?
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It is categorized by the tag on this topic as “researching”. That’s a step above “maybe-later”. However, the Q&A video says it will not be until Q4 at the earliest.
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I need and want HomeKit cameras, for the same reason everyone else in these threads has listed.
As such, I would rather give my money to companies that actually understand the value in HomeKit cameras (including to their own bottom line), instead of continuing pining for that functionality from a company that doesn’t comprehend that.
The ones I had were bought to experiment with - and yes, they are nice little inexpensive cameras with decent functionality - just not in the aspect that I need.
Since I do system integration for smartHomes, were there a chance that Wyze would develop this, I would give it more time - but it’s vwry obvious after this podcast (and their consistent non-replies) that Wyze considers this to be very low priority (that’s code, usually, for ‘no priority’).
If this were to develop, I’d easily buy 50-100 cameras right away, and then that same amount each month for various projects.
As it stands right now, I’d rather invest my resources and efforts into other devices. If Wyze doesn’t care for me, or even their own economic advantages, why should I?
That’s all.
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I said Q4 2019 because for the moment we can’t commit to it. We have to get an exemption from Apple because the second stream is not to Apple’s standard. We also have quite some work to get it done and we don’t have the resources completely locked up. We have also some serious changes in the firmware that we are targeting for Q2, Q3 and Q4 that can impact our ability to do the integration so we have to see some of those changes in place before we can move forward on HomeKit.
It’s on research because we invested 3 weeks of engineering time in the evaluation of the technical work required for the integration. We have also spent several hours in conversation with Apple to understand how to get around some of the limitations.
Also who said we killed it because of hardware constraint???
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