Disappointed & Disgusted

I bought 3 cameras because I thought they were super products; I couldn’t have been more wrong! Even when I don’t touch a thing involving them, their behavior changes with no clues why! Now, I get silent notifications ALL around the clock. This makes my cameras 95% USELESS since security is the reason I bought them to begin with! I also recommended them to all my friends-what a waste of my influence. Sign me up for moving on!

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Welcome to the forums. It is certainly frustrating when things aren’t working the way we prefer.

The Wyze app itself doesn’t decide whether to make a notification silent or to make it out loud, it only allows you to select whether to receive them or not. Silent vs out loud is based on how the phone/device OS was told with various settings to treat notifications from the Wyze app, probably by accident. One thing that may resolve this is to clear the cache and data, uninstall the app and reinstall it. This may allow for changing how this app’s notifications are treated. Otherwise there are more complex things to check depending on whether you are using Android or iOS.

If you give some more details on this, there may be other users here who can help give some ideas of things for you to check or try to resolve the silent notification issue you are experiencing. Though it’s understandable if that is not what you are interested in. Either way, best of luck. :+1:

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Thanks for responding. This isn’t just from my recent problems with only a silent banner notification; it is about the absolute “touchiness” of the many operations of the devices. I’ve got about 7 years invested in 3 of them & it’s like a “friend” who just decides not to be involved for just any reason at all. I know I didn’t spend a lot on them, but I hoped they wouldn’t be so complicated & temperamental; I’d really like simple & steady. I read quite a few responses under the top, tried them, & had no success. Thanks for noticing my frustration.

Understandable. In addition to trying some responses suggested by other users, did you by chance ever try to work with support to resolve your issues too, and if so, what did they tell you? I ask, because sometimes we forum volunteers have the opportunity to pass on feedback about the support experience so that things can be looked into and improved.

I do think that all kinds of varying feedback is helpful for Wyze to hear so that they can recognize any patterns and consider what to do differently and how to help others with similar things in the future. It is toobad that the other suggestions you read and tried did not resolve things for you. Thank you for taking the time to share feedback about what was frustrating with your recent experiences. :+1:

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I have a couple dozen core cams that I use for perimiter security. It took some babysitting at first to tune each one of them in individually since each has its own FOV conditions with objects in the field moving with the wind or sunshine. But, once they were dialed in in with the sensitivity, DZ, AI Smart Detection, and notifications, I have found them to be highly dependable at both AI detection and low latency notifications without any need to babysit them any more. These are my V3 cams. The OG cams have also proven to be quite reliable as well. I can’t say that yet for the V3Pro as it has yet to outperform my V3 and the PanV3 aren’t even qualifying for the quarterfinals.

Because I need to be able to hear by the sound of the notification to know which cam and which AI type is notifying, I have turned off my Android OS Notifications for Wyze and use a 3rd party program for customized cam and AI notification sounds.

If there are any specifics you can provide, we’re all here to help each other get the most out of their cams.

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Thank you! Your experiences give me hope; I will try some of the ideas suggested in this thread, buck up, & work on it. Thanks again!

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Could you tell us which one?

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I use MacroDroid although others have indicated BuzzKill will also accomplish this. [Edit Update: I have been informed that Tasker has similar functionality as well.]

Posted about it in several places:

Different Notification Sound for Each Individual Wyze Device & Type of Motion Alert

Different Alert Sound for Wyze Notifications - Post #1

Different Alert Sound for Wyze Notifications - Post #2

Other Macrodroid macros are discussed here:

Share MacroDroid Macros

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Thank you! This looks promising!

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I will say that I also started using MacroDroid when I read about it from SlabSlayer and it is pretty cool.

Another one I use that is dedicated just to Notifications, is “BuzzKill” which basically has a structure of:

“When I get a notification from [app name] that contains [list a word or phrase or multiple words &/or phrases] [filtered by things like certain times, location, etc] then [do any number actions]”

Example Actions:

  • Mute the notification
  • Fullscreen Alarm with sound and vibration
  • Speak custom text to tell you what notification it was
  • Remind me of this notification repeatedly until I have seen it
  • Unsilence the phone so this particular notification is always heard
  • Snooze the notification
  • Batch it with others to appear during certain intervals or times
  • Custom alerts
  • Replace the notification with something else to hide its content
  • Make it Sticky so it can’t be accidentally swiped away without you specifically seeing & dismissing it
  • Dismiss it automatically
  • And sever more that I skipped.

Almost anything that can be done in Buzzkill can be done in MacroDroid, though Buzzkill is a little easier to use for a lot of people who only care about notifications.

As I said, I use them both. Now I have custom Wyze notifications for all sorts of stuff. Like I can have it automatically silence and dismiss notifications during the daytime when I am home and read alerts out loud at night when it matters, like tell me if a person comes up to my door while I’m sleeping or if my daughter tries to sneak out her window in the backyard or something (which I don’t care about someone being in the backyard during the daytime. I have it make some notifications “Sticky” so I can’t accidentally swipe them away and miss them, like low battery, or leak sensors, etc.

These programs help make notifications from any app so much more useful, and allow me to set custom sounds for each kind of notification, including actually saying words if I want. They’re amazing.

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when you see so many others with the opposite experience, are you at least open about the possibility that you’re doing it wrong?

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Buy EUFY cams. They work great and you don’t have to pay CAM+. 20 seconds video and can detect people not cars driving by.

NOPE … I got a eufy - worked great for a few months until they did some update and ruined them. No SD card works “whenever” – events sometimes catch things. but they keep saying they’re going to fix it – it’s been MONTHS. I have another Eufy sitting in a box and not even bothering to install until they get their act together.

I have 3 Eufy cams and they definitely have had their own extremely frustrating problems of things not working the way they are supposed to, including false person detection alerts, playback issues, notifications not working right on 2 of the 3 cameras, annoying bugs, and then other weird things that they did on purpose like not allowing me to record in 2K if I do continuous recording, only if I set it to events-only. They aren’t very good in dim lighting, etc. Then we could get into some of the active deception issues lately…

I mean, I still use those 3 cams as backup cams in important areas (ie: in case of an AWS outage), and I don’t hate eufy by any means, but I would never recommend Eufy over Wyze in general, though each have their strengths depending on a person’s use case. Overall, my Wyze devices work really well and better than almost all the other companies I’ve tried, and at a fraction of the price. To me, the phrase “You get what you pay for” has basically come to mean that you can pay a lot more for the same thing or worse since the other companies are just charging higher profit margins and will completely ignore their users anyway, and thus I’d have a lot fewer of the devices I want, or I can buy basically the same thing, often with more features from a company whose business model is low profit margins, high volume, and know I’m always getting a good deal, never getting ripped off, resale value holds high because it was already basically sold at near cost, etc (so no risk either because there are always people willing to buy it for fairly close to MSRP if I ever want to sell it off). Basically, do I want to pay more for higher profit margins, or lower with lower profit margins. I find the same issues almost everywhere with a very small amount of variability, but it all depends on what I want to pay for. At least that’s been my experience with most IoT and I now prefer to avoid those with high profit margins because in my experience the extra price is rarely put into higher quality, just deeper pockets.

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I’ll NEVER buy another Wyze camera. I have 3 that are useless because I have 5G wi-fi and they won’t connect. I’ll take my $$ elsewhere.

Welcome to the forums! Wyze cams are advertised as using mostly all 2.4 ghz Wi-Fi (VDBP I believe does have 5ghz for the chime). There is a existing wishlist requesting more Wyze devices use the 5 GHz Wi-Fi spectrum. Did you mean 5ghz by chance? Because 5g relates to cellular connectivity, not Wi-Fi.

Here is that wish list if you’d like to vote on two support.

What type of network/wifi equipment do you have, because it’s uncommon to only have 5 ghz Wi-Fi from your router or access point unless it’s configured that way manually.

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My main beef with 20+ V3 cams is that the go to a status of “off” if not viewed via the app for 24 hours or so. Then no events get recorded. Major PITA.
Also, windows client “live” view is NOT. It displays an earlier view and does NOT update to current “live”; however, “events” seemingly works well (so far).
All Cams on current f/w and Cam+ plan.
Very disappointing.

If you have verified that there are no Rules active that are turning off the cams, this sounds like your WiFi is definately not playing nice with your Wyze Cams and is dropping them.

I haven’t found it to be very useful or feature packed either. I prefer the faster and more reliable P2P live stream rather than routing it thru the interwebs to their server and back.

Latest MESH system in use.
Speed tests from each cams physical location very good.
And didn’t have this issue in the early days before Wyze growth.
To Me it looks like a Hosting problem vs Client.

Also would like to use P2P. But doesn’t that require RTSP capable Camera ?
Can’t see Cams with IpCam Viewer, or Tiny Cam either.
Would welcome edification.