Green filled circle won't go away

Not a very happy first time experience with my new WyzeCams. Just bought two of them got them installed they worked great… for a minute, then the app said there was an app update and camera firmware update. Now I have this green circle thing on the view screen, at least it doesn’t get saved on the recorded files. I’m running android 4.4.2 I don’t remember seeing anything about needing android 5 and above on the WyzeCam Purchase/Buy web page several weeks back when I ordered the cameras. I’d be okay with the suggestion of a static pre-android-5 version of the app if that’s the only solution you can come up with.

 

Well the green circle bug only effects older phones.

So my guess is its not a priority at all, and may never be.

But I would hope for a way to allow us to go back to the earlier version

 

Kent there is a solution to this problem. The answer is for everyone with this problem is to repackage

camera’s and return them…

When I pre-ordered I was aware of the Android 5+ requirement.

There are also some bugs with the Blink Camera app at 4.

The Wyze cameras are so inexpensive, hard to complain.

4 bags of yard mulch at Lowe’s. And that provides about 10 minutes of entertainment.

And a Motorola X4 for under $300 unlocked and will work with any US carrier.

Even Southwest has given up on Andriod 4

Options for WYZEcam developers are :

  1. Leave things as they are. After all, somewhere is says that Android versions < 5 are not supported. However, this was not made blatantly clear to buyers at purchase time. The prudent thing to do is fix it.
  2. Make the previous app version available to buyers with older phones - not the best idea, since app update improvements will leave them behind.
  3. Upgrade the phone - expensive fix for the user. The users with older phones are probably not the the ones that stand in line for the latest Handy Dandy on the market. My old phone does all I need it to do.
  4. Put an option in settings to disallow the circle graphic to ever startup. This would be a simple modification in C++. If the app was developed using Java or one of the cross platform scripting languages for both Android and IOS, then maybe not so simple.

As a general update for everyone watching this issue, this is something we are still looking to resolve. I even did some repro work it the bug on a tester phone I personally own with 4.4.2 on it to give to the Devs so they can attempt the repair. While we officially support 5.0+ on Android we would rather fix the issue for our users whenever possible.

Again, I will follow up with more information as I have it, but at this time the bug is still in the ‘being researched’ phase. Thank you for everyone’s understanding!

This is a priority for us, but depending on what is the root cause of the issue will depend on what fixing it means. I will be updating this thread as I get information from the Dev team!

Because the previous app worked on Android < 5.0, and the upgrade was offered to those phones, which then introduced a serious usage issue, Wyze should provide a version of the app with working notifications that will work on versions of Android that previously worked.

But I also think they should put in a check for phone o/s version before offering updates, so updates that may break the app won’t be offered to old phones.

 

My recommendation to Wyze:

  1. Fix app so for versions < 5.0 so Animation does not occlude live view. https://www.wyzecam.com/forums/topic/green-filled-circle-wont-go-away/#post-146422
  2. New versions of App should have min supported version check before offering update. Perhaps allow version update with warning for Beta participants.
  3. The Buy page should make the user click the type of mobile device and version it is running, and warn them if they are below supported version. It is better to lose a sale than to have a vocal unhappy customer.
  4. If possible, you should set up a camera and publish the login for the "shared limited access" account so potential buyers could download the app, and try it on their phone. They wouldn't be able to get alerts, but they would be able to view live feed and know that their platform was able to run the app.

I have the WyzeCam app 1.3.123 on 5 different Android devices. Only one of them has the “green filled circle won’t go away” problem, and that is a Fire Phone running Fire OS 4.6.6.1.

I am happy it runs at all on that device, but here is a data point I think is worth sharing: The ONLY 1.3.123 device I have that displays a version 2 camera livestream WITHOUT an annoying 5 second delay (and without a lot of motion tearing) is… yup, the Fire Phone. Hypothesis: the animated “loading” icon indicates that additional code or functionality is not yet active, and on other platforms where that step does complete, the additional functionality introduces high latency and video motion tearing.

Not related to this thread, but I’ll mention it anyway: EVERY ONE of my devices running ver 1.3.123 is UNSTABLE, meaning that the live stream freezes after a short while (minutes to hours). I have ONE device still running app ver 1.2.76, and it is rock solid (for days to weeks). That instability and the high latency on v2 cameras are my highest priority wishes for improvement. Or the ability to go back to 1.2.76 (which still has the latency problem on v2 cameras, but at least doesn’t freeze all the time.) :frowning:

Hi again everyone! Got another update, some good and some bad news.

Good new: They have located the cause of the blue dot not going away and have put a fix into the current Alpha build. I got this loaded onto my tester phone and was able to confirm that it was repaired. This will be rolled into several other fixes for app 1.3 going to Beta early next week. Provided everything goes well in Beta this should go to full release end of the next week, but this is subject to change if we find any major bugs. If you do not want to wait long until it goes to release I would suggest signing up for our Beta program Here. For Android users you can toggle Beta on and off from the Google Play store as well, so if you want to join for the fix and leave after it has gone to release that is fine and should only take a couple of minutes to remove yourself from the program

Bad news: We have been testing notifications on 4.x.x with the new Google notification service, but it is reporting failed to these devices. Our Dev team currently believes this is a restriction on the Google service side of things, and we may not be able to repair this one. I believe they will be doing some extra testing on this, but we are much less sure of being able to prevent this going forward.

Please feel free to let me know if anyone has any questions about this, I will be happy to help out the best I can!

The delay is something that are actively working on, I believe we should be seeing some improvement to this in 1.3.133+. When you say the live stream freezes what do you mean? Are you unable to get it to load or is the feed active and then it locks up? When you say minutes to hours, are you leaving the feed open for this whole time or returning to it later?

Thanks!

Thanks for your reply. Short answer: live feed is active, then locks up. I leave it on constantly (just as with any surveillance / security camera?)

My goal: I have two cameras (v1 and v2), and I want to monitor them from two different rooms. Of course that means having four devices running the app. (Eventually I hope the app will support livestream display of multiple cameras.)

My expectation is that I should be able to start a livestream on each tablet or phone and have it show a near real-time image indefinitely (or at least until the next app or Android update :slight_smile:

What happens with 1.3.123 (and, alas, 1.3.125) is that the livestream will freeze after a relatively short while; whereas, the one device I have that is still running 1.2.76 often goes for more than a week without needing a restart. (I consider a good goal would be at least a month, assuming the underlying OS stays up that long :slight_smile:

When the livestream display freezes, the time stamp no longer updates, and the image darkens --suggesting that the app knows it’s frozen. The UI controls still work; i.e. I can hit the back arrows and get back to the “devices” screen, and click on the desired camera to restart the livestream.

Edit: Chaged 1MHz to 1GHz (yeah I am old enough to remember 1MHz CPUs)

If I understand what you said, you are streaming two instances of the same video feed to two mobile apps. And doing so with 100% duty cycle.

I can think of many possible failure scenarios. The one I thought of first is that both streams are being sourced from the same “fixed size” circular video buffer, each stream having its own pointer into the next part to display. If one mobile device gets too far ahead of the other, it may cause problems for the other. Or perhaps the Wyze cam is just getting overloaded, it is evidently a single core 1GHz clocked CPU (MIPs instruction set in v2)

Can you reproduce the problem when streaming to a single device?

Thanks… but the problems started with the 1.3 upgrade. And yes, a single device monitoring a livestream will freeze if the app is 1.3.123

Good morning Wyze&Shine hope your day is going great… i am wondering whether there has been any on the fix of the green filled

circle? Thank you for any information you can provide. Marc

Thanks for reaching out! We have been able to repair it in our Alpha build, this will be pushed to Beta in the near future (information on that in my last post here). This build has a number of bug fixes, but once we have tested them it will be pushed to full release. Currently we are aiming for full release by the end of the month, but this will be dependent on how the Beta testing goes!

lucy

I have the" rolling ball" syndrome.

I have several Wyzecams and love them. However, I now have “an undocumented feature”! :wink:

For months my cameras my cameras worked relatively flawlessly.

After a software update I now have “the rolling ball” syndrome.

Our phones and tablets are all running earlier versions of Android and worked well until the update.

Could you at least put the rolling ball in in the upper right corner?

I’m retired and living on a fixed income. I can’t replace all our phones and toys. Help!

I was surprised today with new camera setup and could not get rid of green circle with Android 4.4.4 on all active tablets and phones. Tried on inactive phone with 5.1 and it was good.

Tried tinycam and discovered it crashes on devices with 4.4.4, but worked on 5.1 phone.

Conclusion is that Wyzecam on tinycam free is also affected by Android version.

 

I haven’t received an update yet. How do things look?