IMO it’s a deal breaker. I can’t believe this hasn’t been addressed. Basically if we want to share devices, we have to turn off a major set of product features.
My family uses the cameras to monitor older parents. We share a large number of cameras and we’re in different time zones.
[quote=“alexandre, post:15, topic:208206”]
FilterBox Notification Manager and buzkill
[/quote] were mentioned in this thread but both are only available on andriod devices NOT on iOS devices.
In addition to FilterBox and BuzzKill that @donhp mentioned, MacroDroid (which is what I use) is also a capable App. I believe Tasker may also be capable although I have not used it.
Unfortunately, due to strict restrictions the iOS Gestapo places on apps mucking about and fiddling with core functions such as Notifications, I believe these apps are only Android compatible.
Do you have any other Wyze devices that use notifications, or just this 1 camera?
You could mute all notifications from the whole app so you don’t get the notifications.
On Android, you can set all notifications to “Silent” so you still get them, but they don’t make a sound or vibrate your phone, but you can scroll and see them later if you want.
Also on Android, you can use other notification control apps to decide which notifications come in and which don’t.
This really should be fixed as it is a user experience issue that severely reduces the utility of the camera sharing “feature”. Turning off all notifications, especially when that includes your own, likely higher priority cameras, is not a solution for most users. The Multiple Users’ Permissions for Shared Users Wishlist item is tied for 6th in most likes, but seems to me like the topic is too muddled with several features (notifications, playback, SD access, etc etc). Can we carve out just this notification item and try to get it pushed through?
Agreed, i just got my mom a cam to watch a family of foxes and this was the first camera i’ve had shared to me. Not being able to kill the notifications on it makes me want to just remove it.
How is this not a thing yet… Bought my mother a camera for her to get bird feeder alerts. She like to see the birdy visitors she gets, but it also views her backyard which I like to have access to if she’s mowing the lawn or something (shes getting up there in age). But, I don’t need to have 600 alerts a day from the birds.
This has created a situation where I have to mute alerts on my phone and it makes me miss my own alerts for my cameras.
Could someone guide me to where to vote this feature up in the wishlist.
Hi Owllicks
I’ve had this same issue for years now. I had 4 cameras and 2 door cameras, 2 thermostats and more Wyze products. The lack of this one critical feature drove me to stop using all Wyze products. It’s such a basic requirement I don’t know why it’s never been fixed. Good luck.
While some have suggested using 3rd party software to filter notifications based on the device name, even that doesn’t work if the shared device has the same name as one of your local devices.
Which has it’s root in another big issue that you can’t give a shared camera your own alias.
With common names like “Garage Camera” or “Porch Camera”, it gets confusing fast and it’s a poor solution to expect the person sharing the camera to change the name to something that’s longer, harder for them to identify, and harder to reference when using voice assistants.
The sharing feature seems to have mostly been an afterthought, and not a very well thought out or executed one at that. It has been a year and a half since I tried it, and nothing has changed with it that I’m aware of, and haven’t seen any mention of any upcoming improvements.
That being said, from what I recall with setting up sharing of Blink cams for some friends, they couldn’t customize the names of the remote cams either, though they could set different notification settings on them.
I just tried something that seems to work. In the app, under ‘Automations’ , i created a custom automation for the group of cameras i wanted to turn off notifications for. To start, I grouped thrm together as a “device group” of cameras. Then created the custom automation. Clicked “+”, then "create automation ". Then type: “schedule”. Click on “Add action” and select the specific group you created under “group actions”. Then “turn off notifications”. You can select a start time with no end time and select all days if you want. So far, this seems to filter on those cameras from other groups whose notifications i do want to see and not the cameras i don’t (including certain shared cams).
The problem is, you’ve found the workaround to change the settings for the cams that are shared to you, so you’ve disabled notifications for the cam owner as well. But they can’t see your automation so they won’t be getting alerts and won’t know why. Good way to become un-shared once they figure it out
When I first played with shared accounts (set up a second Wyze account to test things out) I found that workaround, and the person I shared a couple cams with was instructed not to create any rules (as they were called then).
So I just had a chat with Francis from Wyze and they sent me here. This is a real problem with Wyze products. I have two dozen of my own cameras of various vintages and need notifications form many of them all the time. Now with a few shared devices family wants me to monitor at select times I AM GETTING THEIR NOTIFICATIONS ALL THE TIME. Need to have the ability to selectively turn off notifications from shared devices!! THIS SHOULDS BE SIMPLE. Wyze is apparently IGNORING THIS request. Going to start posting this in Amazon reviews. Maybe that will get thier attention.
Unfortunately as you’ve seen here, while there is a way to do it through automations, you’ll disable the alerts for the “owners” of the cams too. If that is OK, then it is a viable solution for you.
But if not, the only thing I’ve heard of people doing is using a 3rd party “notifications manager” app on their phone to be able to customize notifications, I’m not sure how granular they can get but pretty sure you can filter alerts based on the cam name, since that is included in the notification.
Add your vote to the wishlist topics on guest accounts, and by all means you can complain in reviews and on reddit etc, however many have already done those things and it hasn’t helped so far.
If I’m recalling correctly, @carverofchoice may be able to recommend a notification manager app, I believe he has talked about this before.
Yes. I do this. I know for sure the following notification parsing apps work on Android to let you selectively turn off notifications for specific cameras without affecting other people:
Macrodroid
Buzzkill
Tasker
I don’t recall if those have a Freemiun version or if they all charge a fee, but I paid for them all.
I do know there are some open source alternatives that are free. I don’t recall their names offhand though. The above 3 apps have worked great for all my needs.
Basically as stated by Dave27, you would just tell the notification parsing apps to watch for a notification from the Wyze app with that camera name and tell it to intercept and automatically dismiss it before it shows up. You’ll never see it, it won’t vibrate or make a sound, etc. It will be like it never existed.
I do this a lot because there are some notifications that I want one phone to intercept and use as an automation trigger (I make the app send a web hook to home assistant trigger an automation), then have my primary phone dismiss and ignore the notification because I don’t actually care or need to see it on my primary phone.
If you have iOS, you’re out of luck because Apple doesn’t allow it’s users or app developers to have any access to do customization stuff, including any access to the OS’s general notification API. I don’t expect Apple will change any of this for at least another half decade at best, and then probably only if the EU forces them to expand their customization options.
Every time I use the AI chatbot about this issue, the bot thinks there is a solution before I tell the bot there is not. Then the bot agrees there is no way to turn off notifications from shared cameras. I then communicated with a support agent who still responded with what seemed like a message at least filtered through AI. The agent contradicted herself in her reply saying on one hand you cannot turn off shared camera notifications but on the other hand I should turn them off for the shared cameras. These quotes are within the same email:
“In the meantime, if you want to limit notifications from shared devices, you could adjust the notification settings for each shared camera within the app.”
The AI chatbot continues to suggest a non-solution. The agent offers a solution and a non-solution. This must be more difficult to resolve because of some way it is built on the backend, or I’m not sure they are aware it’s an issue.