“Wyze Cam - One Year Down, One Million Units Sold.”
(I know this is an old number.)
Let’s put the complaints in perspective:
Wyze cams get very good reviews on Amazon.
So, Wyze sells a million cameras of which 90% of the customers are satisfied.
(That is better than most cheap video cams made in China.)
That leaves us 100 thousand unsatisfied customers. Say 10% of those are really disgruntled or pissed off enough to complain publicly about it.
There are far less than 10 thousand complaints in these forums.
The majority of customers are happy with their purchase.
That doesn’t let Wyze off the hook for the problems they do have.
Remember; this is a very small company. They don’t have hundreds of engineers and programmers. I’m sure their products will continue to get better.
So, just using your numbers, the 100,000 people who left bad Amazon reviews on the Amazon web site don’t count as “publicly complaining”? Because they didn’t also register and post at an additional forum site for the vendor they already decided against using?
Could be. But that’s why it’s called a SWAG. I believe the point he was making was that the vast majority of owners were happy with their purchase and only a small percentage of those that were not happy were unhappy enough to actually complain on a public forum. The actual numbers were purely illustrative not literal.
I don’t believe he expects anything different? Perhaps you read what he wrote differently than I did? It’s no big deal either way.
Well I think you’re being too kind. He or she is using the made up numbers to pretend to make a conclusion based on evidence. “There are far less than 10 thousand complaints in these forums.”
I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation under the worst circumstances.
The real bottom line is: It is well known that an unhappy customer is more likely to write a review. Based on this, Wyze has a healthy ratio of good to bad. The numbers are based on the fact that Wyze has sold over a million cameras, and you can look at Amazon reviews of the Wyze V2 camera and get the idea that most people are satisfied with their cameras. No, this isn’t a scientific study, just an observation. I take it you are an unhappy customer.
“Wyze Cam - One Year Down, One Million Units Sold.”
That’s an old quote from the Wyze company. The Amazon reviews reveal approximately 1 in 10 customers is unhappy. So, about 100 thousand customers per 1 million are unhappy.
Yes, it is not a scientific study
Of the 30+ clients where I have installed Wyze cameras, the only complaints have been that they needed more training. Generally, if the client only uses their phone, I don’t here anything. If they use Amazon Alexa, that is where I get the complaints.
We were early Wyze enthusiasts but evolution of the hardware and software should improve the performance. That has not been my experience. I have a home with DSL and a lake place with Hughes satellite. I now find myself swapping out all the v1 cams at home for v2s from the lake. With each firmware upgrade the v2s got less reliable until they stopped working completely. I would call that dropping the ball.
I’m so fed up with Wyze not fixing the alert delay after so long that I’m leaving unfortunately. I’ve purchased 3 different similarly priced cameras and they all alert almost instantly. Sigh… What good is a security camera that waits from 2 to sometimes 10 minutes to send an alert? None to me.
I am going to speculate here. Any camera that uses the IoT model is going to suffer, at some point, various ills.
The exceptions to this will be those companies that put local only operation first and the IoT aspects second. Possibly those companies that work with HomeKit?
IoT depends on Internet connectivity both for extending the processing capacity “off chip” and for monetization avenues. So it’s not really in the vendors interest to make disconnected use workable.
Recently my brand new Eufy 2K camera failed. When I went online to check it turns out they were experiencing an cloud failure that was affecting a significant portion of their cameras. It was resolved in hours but during that time I could not access my camera.
I also have the new Eufy 2K pan & tilt cam. Additionally I also have the Wansview Wireless Security Camera.
Both alert me almost instantly every time. I also had the same outage problem yesterday for a few hours with the Eufy camera. In researching this it seemed to be a server problem on their end that has happened before but seems to be really rare perhaps once a year some comments said. So in my view, although it’s irritating, it would be like having a power outage at your house, something beyond your control and as long as that doesn’t happen often, it’s part of life I guess.
I do like the higher resolution 2K camera, However it doesn’t have a programming schedule like the Wize camera for setting blackout times and days.
Yes, it is equivalent to a power outage in some ways. That said it goes to my point about any camera or device that is an IoT device is susceptible to these outages. Worse if the company goes out of business or is acquired you could lose your use of the device.
With the advent of HomeKit and similar technologies this is being mitigated somewhat. These Achilles heels mean that for the few cameras I have determined to be critical I use local only cameras that are not IoT and are both wired and battery backed up to include their lan connections. This way even typical power failures are not an issue unless they are over 24 hours in duration.
Yes and of course it’s not just cameras. There are SO MANY links in the chain for most smart home users. I’ve got a mix of Alexa and Wemo and Leviton and Firestick and Wyze and Chromecast and whatever vendor made those outdoor outlet controls and whatever that noname switch is, and maybe one or two I forget. Every piece of it is dependent on at LEAST one of 5 or 6 vendor servers staying online and responding quickly and accurately 24x7, in addition to the Alexa console function we rely on. Every “skill” I add to Alexa is yet another set of dependencies on server and software hosting from a vendor who sold me something a year or three ago and whom I’ve paid zero since.
Oh, almost forgot the robot vacuum.
And in the scheme of things I’m a piker who has barely tipped a toe in this stuff. Every time you install a new smart home app you’ve created another exposure to another vendor’s infrastructure.
Several of these companies have already gone belly up, leaving hardware owners stranded. This is really early days in this kind of thing, but I bet things get a bit worse before they get better. Heaven knows what actual resiliency or disaster recovery most of these have (my bet is zero), and let’s not even begin talking security.
I think maybe the manufacturers could turn over their server functions to a Google or Alexa under their massive umbrellas it would help stabilize and standardize, but as far as I know that is NOT the way the world currently works. The actual control for your Wemo device is left to a Belkin operated server, your Wyze camera to a Wyze operated server, etc., with the “skills” just bare bones links between the two. The economic model for keeping all these things afloat is shaky.
It is many, many points of failures. Frankly it’s a really pleasant surprise how well things have worked so far. I for one can get Alexa to turn on the lights nearly 9 out of 10 tries.