I think this is a misunderstanding. Wyze employees respond to people a lot even for things “they don’t like.” I have seen them in Discord, Reddit, Facebook, and even here. It’s not really about whether or not they like a post, but more about if they can make a difference, particularly if they can help in ways other users or volunteers can’t, or when they happened to check in before someone else answered it. They also respect allowing people to vent (within the guidelines…as long as they’re not abusive or attacking another user) such as was the point of this thread. Someone who has already thrown their products away and tells others to stay away, well, let’s face it, there is no reason for them to join in the conversation. The person doesn’t want help, they’ve already made a decision, and coming into the thread usually just means the person will get aggressive and confrontational and in some ways the employee would just be provoking that instead of helping. Rarely does any good come from it, and it’s often unwanted. Often, a similar thing is probably true for any somewhat aggressive post in general. Rarely is there a benefit to joining that conversation, but often a high risk of making things worse, which they don’t want to do. I’m not speaking for Wyze, but the above is pretty standard for lots of businesses in general, and I am just speaking from what I see.
Ah, I think that’s part of the misunderstanding here. This isn’t a support board. The forums are intended for USER TO USER interaction, and not intended as an extension of support. If someone is having an actual support issue, they should contact support by phone, chat or email and that is where they will get direct attention with an employee instead of other users. That’s not to say that there aren’t employees who often look over things or review what’s going on in the user platforms, but the primary intent and objective of the forums is give us users a place to talk to other users, not employees. That’s a misunderstanding. This isn’t a intended as a support board, though many of us users are more than happy to help out fellow users and some of us volunteers do have backchannels to escalate certain important issues when necessary, such as when someone lets us know that a support agent did something incorrect and we need someone else to review that support ticket and go fix it and give that agent coaching or whatever. other than that, the issues are supposed to be referred to support so users can talk to a trained employee that is dedicated to handle support.
Honestly, that’s not been my experience. I am actually a moderator on a few different “forums” on other platforms (other than for Wyze); additionally, in the past I worked customer service for multiple Fortune 500 companies (ie: companies that are so successful they are valued in the billions and make billions per year, which is a decent indication that their products are as objectively “good” as the market can say), and yet I heard all the same things for those companies as I do here or anywhere. I could find message boards/forums packed with complaints for almost any company. It’s impossible to please everyone and there are always lots of people who have negative experiences and opinions on anything. I am in forums for some of Wyze’s competitors, and have products from them, and I can tell you that they all have people saying the same things in all of them. Part of it is human nature.
Having said that all that, I do agree that Wyze has recently had some firmware release struggles. I know part of that had to do with critical security measures that were urgent and had to bypass beta testing. That sucks for everyone. I had some cameras go non-responsive too. It is frustrating. I do have some mixed feelings about firmware updates. Wyze does often do a lot of firmware updates, and that makes it more likely to have more bugs come up (as a former professional QA Tester, I could go on and on about how even a small amount of code of like 14 lines of code and 4 total decisions to make, it can take automated tested over NINETEEN YEARS to finally test every single possible outcome to see if there are any bugs, and that’s all before taking into account the different environmental variables, etc… I talked a little more about that in detail with an actual example in this thread:
So, on one hand, I’m sure Wyze would love to get to a MOSTLY stable build of firmware and never touch it again, but they have to sometimes do security updates, which throws a wrench into that, and then they’d have everyone mad at them for never doing new updates and added features. If we look at the wishlist, people are already angry and leaving because they feel their pet request was ignored or at least not prioritized. But as Wyze adds new features and codes, it adds exponentially more complication and room for bugs, and that’s frustrating for us users too.
I said earlier that I have cameras from competitors of Wyze, and one of my biggest complaints for one of them is that they almost NEVER do firmware updates. I have some major bugs I reported years ago, and they just don’t care. They have never added new features and not fixed some major bugs I found and experience. I’d hate for Wyze to switch to doing that business model instead…I like them giving me new features, and fixing found bugs, and doing security updates so often. I love it…but the downside is that it does add potential for more bugs again. I mean, I don’t want them to switch to a model where they get to a semi-stable point and just go stale with never adding new cool stuff…I want them to fix things, and I want them to add things, but it does suck when we have to deal with what comes with that. It’s a tough thing to balance. Users demand they continually add stuff, and users also get upset when they do. In my experience they generally do a reasonable job at resolving everything that is critical and important (again, saying this from my background as a pro QA tester), but it is still frustrating when we do have something go non-responsive during an update like happened to some of us recently. I will say that for me, that situation is pretty rare though. I won’t say the grass is greener somewhere else, because it all depends on what a person’s personal preferences are. There are tradeoffs everywhere, and people complaining about the same or different things everywhere. Everyone should definitely find what fits and suits them though. Not everyone should love or stick with Wyze. I don’t want them to be a monopoly. I want there to be tons of “Wyze Killer” competition out there and companies that all push each other hard. I support people using whichever one suits their particular preferences better.
However, I will say that there are people here who have nearly zero problems with Wyze at all. So, if some people are having nearly a flawless experience, it does beg the question of what is the difference, and maybe Wyze still plays a part, but likely so does something else, like router protocol, or one of any number of other things, such as some of the things I listed in here: