I am an early long-time Wyze user with a large camera install and more badges than I can count. I was an early buyer of the Sense products and had a lot of optimism about the future direction of the company. The v1 door sensors woes left a bad taste in my mouth (bricked if battery power lost) but I stayed optimistic and kept with it and bought into the first Sense 2 kits. Used the motion and contact sensors from my kit in my garage for some basic open/close notice. I subsequently got into the larger Home Automation scene and my first efforts used the Wyze IFTTT integration and could do most of what I wanted for a while. It quickly became apparent that the Wyze business strategy was moving away from encouraging integrations to creating the classic “walled garden” eco-system. But they were not moving fast enough or broad enough to match the pace of other vendors so there garden has stayed relatively small. While many prosumers (or enthusiasts) were investigating the vendor agnostic services such as SmartThings or Home Assistant it became clear Wyze was not interested in participating or facilitating this direction. So while my camera investment was a little too high to consider replacing, I kept the Sense stuff hoping that maybe Matter would someday bridge the garden wall. So anyway, my Sense hub has failed its firmware upgrade for the last year and support was no help so I have to make the decision to purchase a hub replacement or not. A milestone if you will and I’m kinda sad that I am giving up on the Wyze platform for anything non-camera. I had hoped they could figure out a business model to support and encourage their technology in MY ecosystem. For half the cost of the replacement hub, the 2 contact sensors are now Aqara (a company that encourages and builds for integration) and I no longer have the aggravation of trying to troubleshoot the firmware issue (about 6 hours so far).
Gotta say I’m more sad than pissed. I like most of the products and obviously the price point is still great, but I so firmly believe this stifling of product interoperability is a fatal business strategy. I very much want to be able to use 1 app for my home control and monitoring, which I believe most customers want. Was hoping it could be the Wyze app but if not, I expected Wyze to enable or at least allow that capability elsewhere. There are a LOT of contributors in the Home Assistant world who have gone to great lengths to make certain aspects and features of the Wyze products available to them, but these remain “unsupported” by Wyze so can go away any time they make a change so I am no longer willing to invest the time to keep the Wyze products useful.
I do recognize that my view may not be the norm and that 90% of folks may be deliriously happy with the Wyze roadmap. What are your thoughts? I’m genuinely curious if anyone else has been trying to decide the long term viability of Wyze in the larger Home Automation realm.