These are not cameras that should be part of a security system. Same applies to any cheap wifi “cloud cam”.
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Agreed — if only they would implement some sort of system to notify us. They always seem to know immediately when cameras go down, yet when it comes to transparency with us, it’s a different story.
I’ve always found it ironic how they have full access to the logs and backend — essentially our data that we’re unknowingly or unwillingly sharing with them — but the moment we ask to see even a small part of that data, the answer is a firm “no.”
I remember back when Wyze cams were actively getting hacked. I asked to see the access logs for my own camera. Not only was I ignored at first, but when I finally got a response, they told me it wasn’t possible. Funny how they can see the logs just fine.
In the end, I guess the joke’s on us. Despite all the issues and lack of transparency, we continue to put up with it and stay with them. Until we don’t.
Offline status for wise products is an area of weakness in general. That and low battery. The door sensors, leak sensors, temp sensors, movement detectors and pretty much anything with a battery does not ever proactively alert me the battery is getting low.
Anything connected to your Wyze system should be able to send you a message if it hasn’t been “seen” for a period of time. If I were head of product at Wyze that would be on my list of first things to solve to make the whole user experience better.
It’s crazy that this feature has been asked for since 2018, and it’s 7 years later and despite its clear utility to the primary function (always-on security), no progress has been made!
I’m not certain that this is entirely true. Note this recent post about a beta version of the app:
A release candidate has been posted since then, and I’d expect to see this feature in the production app within a few weeks, if not sooner. I haven’t used these β or RC versions and can’t speak to any kind of log, but the notifications seem like progress to me.
Welcome to the Forum, @av1! 
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For lack of better words, it’s kind of sporadic. Not sure what triggers it as I haven’t had the time to play around with it. I had to turn few cameras off from the app yesterday and I didn’t get any notifications. I’m thinking maybe it was some sort of a test on Wyze’s end that’s been disabled now.
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I believe you have to go to the account tab, then notifications, then push notifications and toggle on “Device Connectivity Notifications (Pilot)” then make sure that particular camera is checked as “enabled” for those notifications. Then you have to have recent firmware. Even then I believe it is only for certain camera models so far and there may be other qualifications. I remember they were trying to implement something that would make sure they didn’t overload their system recovery time in the event of something like an AWS outage. If they schedule to send out millions of extra notifications when AWS goes down, then when it comes back up it could potentially cripple their recovery and extend the problems. At least that was my understanding. I believe there were some other design debt and other considerations to take into account. There are a lot of factors that contribute to why some of these things take so long (speaking as a person in the middle of app development for a new SaaS startup).
It’s great to see there is some progress though and that the status is listed as “In-development” because this is something I would hope would be a higher priority.
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I have been following posts to this topic since I first posted a request to add the feature back on May 29, 2019. I wanted to second the frustration of many people that this feature is still listed as “in-progress” by Wyze for over seven years. In my original post I even gave Wyze an example of another product (Honeywell water leak detector) that does exactly what we want. And it runs on AA batteries!
In my post I ended with suggesting that Wyze might want to offer water leak detectors. True to their nature of pushing out as many new products as they can. They did add leak detectors, but still can’t push out a notification when our cameras are offline.
PS - If they are beta testing this feature, I’m not sure why they haven’t publicized it more. If I missed the announcement, I apologize to the forum.
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I do know the leak detector issue was brought up to employees recently. Hopefully they will consider some updates to that. I don’t know what their ping rate on those is, but I suspect they should have a scheduled ping/check-in interval and IMO if it misses more than a couple of those in a row then it should let us know somehow. It should also inform us when the battery gets low, which isn’t currently happening. So I agree with you on that.
As for why they haven’t publicized the offline thing more, it’s not yet reliably implemented, which is why it is called a pilot at the moment. They do some non-public beta tests of some things and sometimes they do public beta tests of some things, then they sometimes launch a pilot program and sometimes with all of those they want to keep enrollment limited at first even if it is public, especially if implementation is not global or reliable yet. I have it turned on, but I think I usually only get notifications for V3Pros sometimes and I think maybe V4s. It’s hard to remember because I rarely have cameras go offline unless I unplug them or lose power, and often I don’t get the alerts, but do sometimes. I think it’s not very stable yet so they aren’t ready to tell lots of people to try it yet. But they have been working on it. I’m guessing it’s more of a spare time project vs a high priority project, but I am just wildly speculating.
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This is one of the things that SimpliSafe actually does fairly well, too, just to cite another example. Both their entry and water sensors use CR2032 batteries, and whenever any of those goes offline or regains its connection to the base station, I get a regular SMS message on my phone and their app records a log entry. They’re a closed system, and I’d like to see them make improvements to several parts of their app in particular, so I’m not pushing their products or services. I just think this is one (but not the only) thing they do that works, so it definitely seems doable. Again, I’m glad to see some progress from Wyze on this.
I wouldn’t have known anything about it if I hadn’t seen @habib’s mention of it in one of the Beta topics, but I don’t routinely use the public beta app or go poking around for new features. I appreciate @carverofchoice’s comments about the testing, because I’ve seen this kind of thing piloted in smaller groups, sometimes with a public announcement and sometimes without.
I agree that the communication can always stand improvement, though, and the recent AI Garage Door Detection rollout is an example of that. Some Forum members were commenting about it before the announcement e-mail went out, and one wrote this:
The e-mail I received about it said this near the bottom:
Test AI Garage Door Detection out and send us some feedback on your experience using the survey below. We want to improve the product and customer experience for you.
If they’re looking for feedback, then not posting to their own Forum where they already have engaged customers seems like a huge missed opportunity.
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That is another thing, the pilot toggle was toggled on when I updated the app. Didn’t even know it’s there if you hadn’t mentioned it.
A little heads up from Wyze would go a long way with frustrated users.
Personally I don’t care if I have the feature or not. My cameras rarely go offline and if they do they recover instantly. Also, I have them on live view on my iPad almost 24/7, but for those who want the feature an announcement would’ve been nice.
EDIT: When I said I don’t know what triggers it, I meant if it’s power, internet or WiFi.
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I believe all of them trigger it because all of the above instances would mean that the camera is not pinging the Wyze server and is thus “offline” or unavailable. But I believe it doesn’t happen on a single missed ping. It’s probably only when it misses X amount of pings in a row, indicating the camera is not available/online for some reason. It could be due to power, or Internet, or WiFi or an AWS outage or any number of things.
I had some time to play around. Turning the cameras off from the app doesn’t do anything for obvious reasons. The cameras are not physically off, they have power and a heartbeat aka talking to Wyze servers. When I cut the actual power I get notification about half an hour later. Once I restored the power I got almost instant notification that the cameras are back online. Personally, I think half an hour is a bit to long of an interval to get notified after a camera goes offline.
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Scratching my head on the 30 minutes and the increase in cloud overhead . A month or so ago we had a discussion on this forum related to a push notification. Either I or someone else quipped that if you look at Favorites or Devices you will see an “Offline“ within a few minutes. Recovery seemed just as fast. I for one thought the heavy lifting had been done. I suppose these are not sent to Wyze so to make this all happen they had to rewrite the routine. Still has me scratching head. I must be missing something 
.
Don’t forget, this is still in a pilot stage. I guess, there is still room for improvement.
Most surprisingly, the day after I posted, I got a notification on my phone that 2 of my 3 cameras had gone offline. There seemed to have been a very brief power outage, but they never came back online, even 24 hours later. I had to physically unplug and replug them in to get them to work, something I haven’t had to do in years.
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Some but not all of my Wyze cams has gained the offline notification feature…..
How I found out, in the process of removing them to be replaced with Reolink cams 
Nice to see they finally figured that out….
Nice feature but not worth keeping the Wyze cams 
My cam v3s do it. It’s an embarrassment of riches lately. 
It is great. Now I want the option to turn off the notifications on each camera as I do not want some to give me the message.