Many people have to re-authenticate to IFTTT to Wyze every day to keep it working, myself included.
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Luckily mine s only once every few weeks, but still annoying. For me it is also not just WYZE, it is SmartThings, SmartLife, Life360 and Google, have to do it with them all at different points. That is why I believe the issue lies on IFTTT’s side.
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IFTTT appears to be too much trouble, especially with the delay involved.
I found they changing phone settings to keep IFTTT running in background helped. On my OnePlus phone I disabled IFTTT from battery optimization.
That said it still stops working, just not as frequently.
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I used to have to do that for Wyze, Google, SmartThings, Ring, among others. I still do but now it is much less frequent, on the order of 1 or 2 times per month.
Because of that I don’t use IFTTT for anything I truly care about. But it is useful for utility things. But I too believe the issue is on IFTTT’s side not Wyze or any other 3rd party.
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Even though the issue is a pain, I still think the Wyze products using IFTTT is worth it. I’m not sure what delay you are referring to. I just sign in each morning and that keeps everything running. I have not ever had to re-authenticate my Sonoff devices however, so there must be some way to make it more stable.
Can you tell us, how does that benefit us?. It should be ‘set and forget’.
Sad that IFTTT doesn’t seem to have easily contacted support. Having to reset so often doesn’t allow for unattended security (I realize it is not advertised as a ‘Security camera’ but lets be honest) I think probably 95% of Wyze camera purchases are for exactly that reason.
I’m not blaming anyone, but it would be nice if someone owned this problem and provided a solution other than walking away from Wyze.
I actually use it quite a bit and I have found it to be fairly reliable it’s only the issue with having to re-authorize Wyze that bothers me
I say this way to often, but IFTTT is worth exactly what you pay for it, and not a penny more.
Folks have gotten spoiled by some “free” services and products like those from Google. But not all free to the consumer products are as reliable. And while you may not pay Google they are making money off you. In terms of selling your data.
So I use IFTTT for things that are nice to haves but I never count on the service.
As to why some services in IFTTT require periodic sign ins and others don’t? I truly don’t know but I have experienced both extremes.
Bruce, I agree with 99% of what you said but I do think there are companies that produce things at a very low price and I think they have an honorable intent.
It’s just a different business plan I like the Wyze cameras and I think that the picture that they produce the video is on par with anything out there in the two to $300 bracket it’s the software issues that seems to be a little bit of an issue. But I do believe that overtime they will overcome those also not everybody in the playpen likes to play nice
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I agree about the honorable intent, no doubt. I do not claim otherwise. However there is no doubt in my mind that IFTTT is going to continue to be unreliable. And until that is corrected one would be foolish to trust anything important to the vagaries of its services.
I assume they are paid by the services they enable such as Wyze or Ring or Amazon in some way or another. I honestly don’t know but they have to have some income stream to survive.
Regardless it would do some of the more excitable folks good to take a breath and remember the Terms of Service they agreed to when they signed up.
Edit:
Specifically: “You agree that IFTTT will not be liable in any event to you or any other party for any suspension, modification, discontinuance or lack of availability of the Service.”
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Guys I think there are some points to look for… but this is my first time using the community so… bear with me…
What I believe it is happening is that most of the services are badly implemented.
By that I mean that not the service but the backend of Wyze (and others) are not correctly implementing the OAuth description from IFTTT…
I will give the technical explanation what I think it is happening by using IFTTT API information.
So the step by step of what is happening is that, first, IFTTT request Wyze to access user data by:
“IFTTT authorization Request”
Which has the following result:
"The ifttt scope should provide access to resources for every trigger and action in your service. This way, users will not need to repeat the authentication flow to use all of your triggers and actions.
You may override this parameter by specifying your own scope in the OAuth2 Authorization URL specified in the Service Authentication settings."
But then… what happens?
"Refresh Tokens
You can indicate that your API uses refresh tokens under the “Authentication” tab. IFTTT will continue to use an access token until a 401 is received indicating the token is no longer valid. Once this occurs IFTTT will attempt to obtain a new access token using a refresh token via the token refresh endpoint before attempting the request again.
Please note that refresh tokens cannot have a time-based expiry. The only time it is technically permissible for a refresh token to expire is after an access token has been refreshed. At that time, it is acceptable to return a new refresh token; however, we require that the previous refresh token not immediately expire."
Ok, but then what?
“If the refresh token is not valid , respond with a 401 status code”
Which means that the token is expired and you cannot auth it again to run the service. Because of that, you need to re auth by manually going to the “auth” page and reconnect the services.
So what I believe is that Wyze has not implemented the token expiration, therefore when IFTTT receives the first 401, it will try to get a new token by reaching wyze again, but there is no refreshing service so everything just fails and force everybody to manually do everything again.
Not sure if I am correct… I am not really going to read the OAuth flow right now, but if anyone has some free time…
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749
Anyway… If i said anything (or everything wrong) I am happy to hear some other thoughts.
O… BTW… here is the IFTTT API info…
oh… damn I can’t add more links because I am a noob… ='(
platform.ifttt .com/docs/api_reference#service-authentication
platform.ifttt .com/docs/connect_api#ifttt-connect-api
What you described is a reasonable possibility. However what makes me tend to discount it is the randomness of it. Wyze has gone as far as a month with no issues, then it will go through a period of needing to be authorized 5 times in a day. Same with Ring, and Alexa and on and on.
If it was a badly implemented OAUTH issue I would expect more consistency. That’s why I believe this is something in IFTTT’s wheelhouse.
Sounds to me that Wyze should pay you to fix it.
I agree… but tbh… I am lazy to check the reasons why it would receive the first token “expired” or… 401… I will make a fast check and will give you a reply…
Ok, so there are like lots of reasons for a token to expire… but hear this…
Token Refresh Handling: Method 2
Another method of handling token refresh is to manually refresh after receiving an invalid token error. This can be done with the previous approach or by itself.
If you attempt to use an expired access_token and you get an invalid token error, you should perform a token refresh (if your refresh token is still valid). Since different services can use different error codes for expired tokens, you can either keep track of the code for each service or an easy way to refresh tokens across services is to simply try a single refresh upon encountering a 4xx error.
And then…
Refresh Token Expiration
If your refresh_token has also expired, you will need to go through the authorization process again.
Feels like that… But I think this is how the Wyze backend is implemented… since I don’t work for Wyze I cannot actually say if this is the case… I believe there are Wyze devs here, right?
Maybe the time is actually long but for some reason receive some bad response and then it tries to re auth but it’s not correctly implemented… well who knows… I’m just guessing really… But the issue seems to be the re auth anyway…
Again, that does not explain the random behavior where the same service will work without issue for 60 odd days, then have multiple authentication issues in a day or span of days etc.
What does explain that behavior is if IFTTT has issues with their backend. I worked for many years at various Banks and Financial institutions in IT and I have used OAUTH extensively. The issues we all experience look, smell, and feel like backend issues. That’s not to say Wyze and others have not contributed to the issues.
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And in ‘layman’ terms…
Yes, I do agree with that…
But what I mean is… is this really IFTTT backend issues? I mean… is this something that IFTTT protocol implemented that the service providers clients didn’t implement or is this an IFTTT backend issue?
I saw that wyze has logs in it’s folder (android device) but i believe that the only thing it will say is that it received a token refresh at most…
Is there anything that we can help wyze with to allow them to analyze the issue?