Detection zone settings toggle slider greyed out and inactive

Cameras
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1

I updated my IOS to 18.5 and then I noticed that my Landscape full screen display had changed. So I went to check my two other cameras and found that one was wigging out like the detection zone was not working. It took hours for me to get them all set up but two of them do not have tracking…just a static entry point view. The third camera …our front house and driveway view has always had a detection area set since we realized that the camera would shift the default view left or right with the tracking. So we set a detection zone and tapped the tracking icon under the live view screen and wala it worked for months. Then the major update was released in May and boom messed up as it deleted all our settings. Finally got that working until I finally updated the IPAD yesterday with 18.5 version. As I tried to reset the detection zone it was having major problems. I finally got it…quickly using arrows to get the default view and quickly finger sprinting to the detection settings to SAVE them. I had to break the area into up/down and left/right because it would reset before I was done. SO I did the up/down first, and then the left/right. I tapped the tacking under the Live screen and it did not turn green so I tapped it again. Normally I would get an alert about the detection zone area, but I did not get it. Then I went to the Detection Settings and found them on, but when I went in the slider (showing Green/enabled was unavailable. So I exited out of settings and went back to the cameras live feed and it was shifting again. I went back to the detection settings and this time it showed OFF to the left of the arrow and when I tapped on the arrow the detection settings screen showed the toggle switch off, and tapping on it gave no response. No enable or disable and the screen below the toggle was COMPLETELY WHITE/BLANK!

We reset the camera with the off button and by unplugging it, uninstalled the app multiple times, removed the app and turned off and on the Ipad, and Factory Reset it multiple times. A google phone can enable and disable the dectection zone but we cannot change the detection area itself…in fact, the detection zone is like 1/3 smaller which is really weird, so we deleted the google phone app and factory reset the camera, deleted and reinstalled the app and turned off and on the Ipad just in case. The first time we did this and reset up the camera, the detection zone toggle switch was available and worked but setting the detection area was difficult again with the camera resisting placement. By the time we got it set and enabled the tracking…the stupid toggle switch was inactive/non=responsive again.

Is anyone else having thee issues??? Before this update we used the detection area with the tracking flawlessly and we were told by tech support that this should work the same. What good is a camera that won’t move to look at the person walking right in front of it but not move to watch where they are going…LIKE TO OUR FRONT DOOR!!! Obviously the IOS update caused some issues, but I think the Firmware update is also part of the problem. Anyway, sorry for the length but thought specifics were important. Love to hear from anyone who might have this issue, and maybe even got feedback or a fix from tech support. I still do not understand why once I reset the app and factory reset the camera it no longer fixes it. GRRRRR! lol

2

Yes, and they’ve been reported here in the Forum for a while now. If you poke around in other cam-pan-v3 topics, you’ll find discussion about how it used to be possible to have both Track Motion and Detection Zone enabled, but this no longer seems to be possible, as Wyze apparently now considers these features to be mutually exclusive.

I don’t use iOS, so I can’t speak directly to that experience, but on a phone running the Android Wyze app I can enable Track Motion on a Cam Pan v3 and then navigate into  Settings ➜ Detection Settings ➜ Detection Zone, and when I toggle that ON the app shows (too briefly) a message telling me: “Track Motion has been disabled. Go to the menu bar on the Live stream to turn it back on.” If I do that, however, then the app shows me another message: “Your camera has the Detection Zone setting enabled, which requires the camera to remain stationary. Tap “Continue” to disable the Detection Zone and use Pan Scan.” This is all problematic for several reasons:

  1. The first message about Track Motion being disabled appears too briefly for the user (well…me, anyway) to read all at once.
  2. When I can read the message, it doesn’t really explain why Track Motion was turned off and implies that I can simply go back and turn it on again after configuring my Detection Zone.
  3. When I do have a Detection Zone enabled and go to tap the Track Motion control in the menu bar, the message is telling me about Pan Scan, which is not what I’m trying to enable at all.

Wyze really did not implement these changes well at all, and the messaging to the users is not helpful. This is a hugely frustrating (though not particularly surprising) disappointment.

On top of that, they hosed the behavior of existing Waypoints with the v3.5x app (but those same Waypoints are still working for me on the same camera when I use the v2.50x app control them).

I have no idea what they’re doing. Sometimes I think they might not even know.

The part about the Detection Zone screen being blank below the control at the top when Detection Zone is toggled OFF is the expected behavior, and it’s what I see in the Android app. If Detection Zone is disabled (which it is in this state), then there’s nothing to show for a zone, so nothing else is displayed until you toggle it ON .

Why it isn’t toggling on for you, though, I don’t know, and I wonder if that’s an iOS-specific app problem. (Sometimes there are problems that appear in the Wyze app for iOS users but not Android users and vice versa. That’s a whole other frustration.) In a case like that, I’d be inclined to log it and open a ticket just to try to get it on the engineers’ radar, because it seems like they may have introduced yet another problem in this poorly-executed revamping of Cam Pan v3’s key features.

Welcome to the Forum, @jz12345! :wave:

3

Hiya

Well, firstly, my issue I was asking about specifically, is that I can no longer enable or disable Detection zone settings because the radio button/toggle/slider (whatever terminology people refer it with) is greyed out and there is not image below it at all; the display is just a white background with the greyed radio button and the name of the camera at the top, and that stupid, white par at the bottom with the also greyed out word, Delete. That stupid white Delete bar is on every single screen…wth???

Secondly, the Detection Zone is supposed to track motion and sound (if motion and/or sound are enabled in the settings, including with this update, which after 15 seconds should then revert back to the Detection Area default settings. All five support humans which included to managers with more tech background told me this. I think this update from May 29, 2025 broke this tracking issue, because they altered the software settings for motion and sound in multiple places. My IOS update changed how the display and detection area was working I guess, because they swear the had no push bug fixes for this update. I have never seen a update have such a drastic change after and IOS update before. After I did the update for my Ipad was finished I noticed the detection areas were not implementing on all three of our cameras, and each took me hours to set because as soon as I would move right, left, up, or down a half second later it would quickly shift right back to weird position. One camera was look under our fascia board (under our roof) and another was shifted to the outside wall of our house, and the third was all the way right and pointed down. It was so frustrating until I did one direction move at a time finger sprinted to the settings and saved the placement and then did the other direction.

Anyway, my issue with not being able to see/access/change detection area settings on that one camera seems to be a Firmware glitch or corruption. Sadly, Factory Reset is not a Factory Reset. It is more like a clean software reset. There is a way to reinstall the current firmware or the previous version of the firmware, but the manager told me there are possible dangers to the hardware to flash update the firmware in this manner. We are getting a replacement camera because thankfully our camera was still under warranty by a month. WHEW. Honestly, there update caused this crap, so I should get a whole new camera with a longer warranty than 3 months. GRRR!!! Still, I can test the flash with the old camera if they let me keep it. I will provide the link to the flash update for the firmware with the WARNING: MIGHT NEGATIVELY IMPACT HARDWARE emphasis!!! It may be just a disclaimer because you have to use a computer that has an SD card reader and adapter for the mini SD card, and people without knowledge of this technology use may make a mistake. I also recommend a SEPARATE SD card for this firmware change from your regular camera feed recording. That is just me, it does not say that on the link.

I just hope when we get this replacement camera that the detection zone settings start tracking again (again, which is a built in feature of this setting versus turning on the TRACKING menu option under the live feed image). It worked perfectly for since summer last year until this update on May 29, 2025.

Here is the link to the Flash Firmware update info for anyone that might want to look into it, but PLEASE RESEARCH IT THOROUGHLY BEFORE ATTEMPTING and I recommend you call Wyze Support prior to following through with it!!! Disclaimer: I and Wyze are not responsible if you follow through with this Flash Firmware procedue without talking to WYZE support first!!!

https://support.wyze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360031490871-How-to-flash-your-Wyze-Cam-firmware-manually

4

Just one more note. The detection settings being blank is absolutely not the EXPECTED result. In fact, on my husbands android phone the toggle was working and an image was below it regardless if the toggle was ON or OFF. He could not change the detection area though. We uninstalled the app on that device to eliminate it’s issues from troubleshooting. Also, the toggle is DISABLED/greyed out COMPLETELY…which is NOT expected or normal function…and the reason they are replacing our camera. So, if you are having a blank white screen under the toggle switch when the toggle is OFF then you may also have corrupted firmware. I cannot tell if you can enable the slider ON AND OFF unlike me, but it should a white blank screen with the toggle in either position.

5

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Would you be willing to share a screenshot? That might be helpful for anyone reading this topic.

I don’t think that’s correct. Motion tracking—the Track Motion feature of Cam Pan v3 that allows the camera to pan and tilt in order to track motion in a video frame—is what determines tracking. The Detection Zone feature is what a user can enable if there’s a desire to detect motion in only a specific portion of a camera’s view area. Setting a Detection Zone allows the user to “grey out” (set parts of the image that are excluded from detection) or to “clear” (set parts of the image that are where the user wants motion detected) areas of the camera’s view. These are two different features that do two different things, and apparently it used to be possible to have both enabled at the same time, as other users have reported setting a Detection Zone for the “home” Waypoint so that the camera would return to that position if Track Motion had caused the camera to pan and tilt to a different position after tracking movement or after the user had manually changed the camera’s position.

I never found that to be necessary and thought setting a Detection Zone on a camera with a non-static view didn’t serve much purpose, but other users seemed to swear by this as a kind of “insurance” for the camera returning to its “home” Waypoint.

It seems like what happened recently is that Wyze decided that these two features—Detection Zone and Track Motion—really are mutually exclusive, and so newer versions of the app seem to enforce that, but Wyze apparently didn’t think it was necessary to actually inform users of this critical change, and that’s caused some confusion and consternation for Cam Pan v3 users. That’s pretty much par for the course for Wyze, unfortunately.

Yeah, that’s because they broke old Waypoints in the new app, as I mentioned in my previous post. Oddly (at least it seems to me), even after I did a factory reset on one of my Cam Pan v3s and added it back in the Wyze app, the pre-existing Waypoints are still there and still work in an older (v2.50x) app, but they’re totally hosed in the latest production app (v3.5.5.669 for Android).

They likely will. At least that’s been my experience with a couple of warranty replacements within the past year. I don’t know what the “possible dangers” are that you were warned about, but I wouldn’t sweat the firmware flashing too much. Other Forum members have reportedly done this routinely without significant problems, and sometimes it has even revived a camera that was supposedly “bricked”.

caution Please note!

I will caution you that the instructions for the Cam Pan v3 section (and others) in that Help Center article you linked are wrong, and several of us have tried to get Wyze to change this, because that part of the process actually does cause problems for users. Step 5 in the Cam Pan v3 section says to copy "the folder to the root directory of the microSD card", but this is incorrect! What you want to copy to the root directory of the microSD card is the single .bin file that you extract from the compressed archive in an earlier step. That's the firmware file that the camera will look for as a source for the update, not a "folder" as the instructions tell you. If you do that and follow the advice of using a microSD card formatted FAT32 (Wyze recommends a 32 GB card, but this is HUGE when compared to the size the .bin file actually needs), then you should be fine.

It is when Detection Zone is disabled or toggled off, even in older versions of the app. It looks like this:

Detection Zone disabled (toggled off)
Detection Zone disabled (toggled off)263×496 3.78 KB

When the Detection Zone is off like that, there’s no reason for the app to display any of the other settings for this feature, so the area below the toggle is empty. The controls for setting the zone and for panning and tilting the camera while on this screen don’t appear until Detection Zone is enabled or toggled on, like this:

Detection Zone enabled (toggled on)
Detection Zone enabled (toggled on)263×496 8.42 KB

That’s the expected behavior, or at least that’s been my experience using these for the past couple of years. (Cam Pan v3 was actually my first Wyze Cam.)

6

If the detection zone is disabled, the app shouldn’t even display a blank figure. As expected, it confuses people. This is also a problem at other places in the app. For example, if the spotlight control of the V4 is set to, “Manual”, it shouldn’t show the period, “Sunset to Sunrise”, because it doesn’t apply anymore.

7

What figure? I don’t see anything but a blank area below the toggle on that settings screen when Detection Zone is disabled, which is why I included the first screenshot in my previous post.

I agree about that and about the other comments (in the topic I think you’re alluding to) related to contrast and/or colors to make it clear which option (Auto or Manual) is selected on that screen. I’d apply the same design cues to the screen for microSD card recording settings (i.e., Continuous versus Events Only). On the Spotlight Settings screen, though, when Manual is selected, the Schedule line should absolutely disappear because it’s irrelevant at that point, just like any further Detection Zone settings are irrelevant if that feature is disabled.

8

I meant the detection zone with the blank figure. Just don’t show it at all. Display the slider set at “Off”.

9

Like I said, I believe that’s what’s already being displayed. The toggle is off (Detection Zone ), so nothing else is shown on that settings screen.

Drawing another comparison to the UI for Cam v4 (because you mentioned that and because Cam Pan v3 doesn’t have a Motion Warning setting), the display for Detection Zone settings works in a similar fashion to  Settings ➜ Detection Settings ➜ Motion Warning. When Motion Warning is off, you see Motion Warning Off as an indicator of that feature’s status and a pointer to the next screen. On that next screen, there’s a line for Motion Warning with nothing else below it, because it’s toggled off. The other controls for that feature don’t populate until it’s toggled on (Motion Warning ). That’s how the settings for Detection Zone behave, too.

Wyze should be more consistent with their UI elements in other areas, though. For instance, Cam v4’s Spotlight Settings screen uses toggles (/) for Smart Detections ( Settings ➜ Spotlight Settings ➜ Customize Smart Detections), but Bulb Cam’s motion-triggered light—an analogue to Cam v4’s spotlight—has a settings screen that uses checkboxes (/) for Smart Detections ( Settings ➜ Bulb Settings ➜ Motion) instead. There appears to be no consistent design standard, and that’s also frustrating as a user.