UPDATE: Poster acknowledges a feature was missed. Now poster wants to know why multiple calls to Tech Support AND convos with “moderators” here were not able to provide anyone who could point out user was idiotic for 9 months? Would have accepted the rebuke.
Monitoring Modes offers only three options for action: Mute, Alarm, or Critical.
Mute - stops all notifications
Alarm -triggers a sound at the camera (largely a way to annoy your neighbors when there is a false trigger).
Critical does what it is supposed to do…badly. Critical pushes notifications to your phone regardless of whether Do Not Disturb is on or not. So, a person with a large array (i.e. >10) of indoor and outdoor cameras would want this to be on.
For example, when we are at home sleeping, we want to know if anything triggers any of the cameras in the array because people are prowling outside or perhaps grandma with dementia is sleep walking in the living room again. We WANT those notifications to come to the phone because we want to be able to wake up and confirm whether we should call authorities or not. We WANT these to set the phone settings to override Do Not Disturb. This way, we don’t have to take annoying spam calls about our car’s extended warranty at 1:30 in the morning, but we can still get awakened if we have intruders.
The problem is that the Monitoring Modes (i.e. Mute, Alarm, or Critical) bypass ALL WYZE AUTOMATIONS. A Cam Unlimited Subscriber paying for dozens of cameras cannot remove cameras from the Monitoring Modes.
So Bill wakes up at 0600 and Julie, his wife, is still in bed.
Problem 1: Monitoring sends a notification that bypasses Do Not Disturb when status changes from Away to Home to Disarm. See what follows…
Problem #1.1: When Bill turns the Monitoring from Away to Home to disarm the interior camera notifications, it sends a notification that it just changed status…thereby WAKING JULIE UP…thereby defeating the point of trying to mute a notification; theoretically so Julie doesn’t get awakened because…”happy wife, happy life!”
“Critical” mode in Monitoring overrides all mutes and automations in the rest of the Wyze app, it is impossible to disarm the notifications for JUST the Driveway group. Changing to “Disarm” mode sends a notification that the status changed, so it still wakes Julie up. So when Bill now walks outside to get in the car to go to work, it will send a series of notifications as he triggers every Driveway camera in Home Mode; each one waking Julie up…and making both Bill and Julie progressively more pissed off.
The alternative work-around considered is that Bill sets Monitoring to Disarm at 0600 and rearm as Home at 0700. This option may reduce the number of times Julie is awakened from 7 times to 2 (1 wake-up for each Monitoring Status Change…), but…that’s little consolation. Julie has a hard time going back to sleep.
Problem #2: The monitoring function also does nothing to mute the doorbell motion camera at all. So when Bill’s mom goes for a walk at 06:30, that one goes off, too. And there is no way to mute that camera anymore.
The poorly conceived addition of the monitoring function in the app pretty much *@#$ed everyone because one now has two basic options: either your stuff is “on” or “off”. And it will send a notification to let everyone know that it is changing status. Therefore, it’s like that annoying ex-girlfriend who calls at 0200 saying, “I’m only calling you to let you know that I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” Certainly not worth paying for!
The elegant coding solution to this would be to STOP OVERRIDING OTHER WYZE AUTOMATIONS! For example, the Monitoring Status may be set to “critical” the “Silent for 30 minutes” is selected, there are not “critical” or “non-critical” notifications to be sent! It was intentional!
A little more coordination between coding teams would be beneficial instead of each team working in silos. The coding team working on Automations did a really nice thing adding the “Silent Notifications for 30 Minutes”, but the team coding Monitoring screwed them over by making their efforts moot. There remains a “mute” button on the Home Page of the app in the top right corner, but the Monitoring coding geeks cleverly disabled that.
So basically with Wyze, it’s now “All or nothing”. They have the veneer of being able to control an array, but because they’re rolling out new features and not listening to how those new features are screwing big subscribers, they’re making their company into a glorified cloud-based web-cam for watching your Golden Retriever lick it’s butt when you’re bored at work.
These are minor problems for people with one camera basically spying on the dog in the living room or watching a baby. For those I know paying for subscriptions on literally hundreds of cameras, this makes the Wyze system a useless POS. The moderators here have buried this issue in the “vote for” stuff, which won’t make it to the top because people with one camera don’t have a problem here, or it’s a more manageable issue.
I am about ready to rip out the Wyze system entirely from all of the users I manage and trash this $(@#. Need help now. Understanding that programming takes time, I have been bitching about this for 9 months now, and have heard nothing except from some Tier-1 foreign call center lackey who can’t do anything.
