The problem:
I recently purchased three v3 cameras, and the same day I set them up, Wyze had some kind of outage on their servers. This led to me wasting a lot of time (hours) trying to diagnose the connectivity problem, that turned out to have nothing at all to do with anything I had control over.
This was because it appears that the camera’s response to any kind of connectivity issue is to just keep resetting the wifi connection and starting over from scratch. This meant that what I saw on my end when using my network router to try to diagnose the issue was seeing the client (the v3 camera) appear and disappear from the network over and over again, making it look like a wifi connectivity problem. This was exacerbated by the fact that in this particular outage, during the brief moment of connectivity, the camera did manage to push an image through to the servers, so the thumbnail on the app updated, making it seems less likely the problem was with Wyze servers (even though it was).
The solution:
Improve the camera firmware to have finer granularity on how it deals with and reports connectivity issues. At a minimum it should only reset the wifi connection if it in fact cannot get authenticated on the wifi network. Once it has a connection there, it should preserve that and only reset its attempts to connect to any remote host. It should also improve the voice announcements the camera makes, to inform the user when a valid wifi connection is made, as well as to differentiate between failing to make the wifi connection and failing to connect to a remote host.
For bonus points, include logic to “ping” well-known servers (e.g. hosts at Google or Microsoft domains), to verify Internet connectivity, providing a third level of granularity. I.e. “wifi”, “Internet”, and “Wyze servers”. Again, voice announcements should distinguish these different scenarios.
Of course, if the camera gets as far as a valid wifi connection, that should complete setup successfully, rather than prompting the user to start with the setup all over again.