Wyze Cam V3 App crashes when viewing SD card playback

SD cards on our Wyze Cam V3 cameras. I re-installed the Wyze Cam V3 cameras. Under Advanced options, I was able to “Manage SD Card” and I see it is full of data. I am able to open the playback screen and I can see that there appears to be recorded data and it will play the event I chose from the events list, but when I try to go back or forward, the app immediately crashes. I tried my iPhone, my iPad, through different routers, etc. Same problem. I tried going back into “Manage SD Card” and formatted the SD card and once it finished, it showed no data, so the card was empty. I waited for about one hour for data to write to the SD Card. I looked again at “Manage SD Card” and was shocked to see that the SD card looked almost full after just one hour. We have 7 Wyze Cam V3 cameras that are all doing the same thing, so it is not the SD Card causing this problem. It used to work fairly well and I believe it was a recent firmware or app update that is the cause of this problem, similar to the problem we were having the with the Wyze Flood Pro that took Wyze several weeks to resolve.

What size SD cards? It sounds like they could be bad cards or possibly counterfeit as it sounds like the cam is not able to format them (which will happen if the card is going bad or if the size it reports is fake). But you can try popping them out and formatting in a PC to see if that helps. SD card formatter from sdcard.org is the best utility to use for the “initial” format, after that the cam formatter should work ok (but should rarely need to be used).

The 7 cards worked fine for years then all 7 suddenly start crashing the app at the same time when you try to move through the videos? Your suggestion seems highly unlikely to me and does not compute. This is more than likely a recent firmware or app upgrade.

1 Like

How was I to know how old the cards are?

It is possible that the cards have reached the end of their lifespan. If they’ve all been continuously recording for about the same amount of time, that’s how it happens, they have a set number of writes and often fail around the same time. However I would agree that 7 all at the same time is a bit of a big coincidence. But are you sure they all stopped at the same time or were maybe some not working for a while before you did the reinstall and format, and only then did you notice?

I don’t have any regular v3s but all my other cams use SD cards and the latest firmware/app and are working fine. I’d be surprised if it was app or firmware related and we aren’t seeing a ton of similar complaints here.

I would take out one card as a test and format it in the PC. Maybe when you reinstalled the cams it updated the firmware from an older one and corrupted the cards.

Actually when you de-installed or re-installed the cams, did you just unplug them without doing the “safe eject” of the card? If so, they could be corrupt and a quick format in a PC will fix that.

What App version, what kind of phone, what phone OS version?

So this is very interesting. I look at the camera live feed, go to the playback option. The feed appears to be going back exactly five minutes from the current time and the video is playing forward with no problem. I chose a different date, two days ago and I can see the video playing with the timestamp of two days ago, so it is recording fine to the SD card. The moment I try to move any direction in the video using the other methods, i.e. 30:seconds forward or backward or try to move the cursor on the ruler bat, the app closes down. It crashes essentially. This is happening on all 7 Wyze cam V3 cameras that I have. I think at some point there will be more people who will realize this is happening.It is NOT the SD card.

IOS and app are all up to date.

How do you know it isn’t in any way related to the SD card?

Since this isn’t a widespread issue, it is something going on with your setup.

Try uninstalling and reinstalling the app, but it is still possible something with the formatting of the SD cards is causing it to have trouble indexing the files or feeding some bad data back to the app that the app can’t handle. Seems less likely but can’t totally rule it out.

With 27 years of a technical background this is not the first time I have been the first one to discover an issue and help developers isolate the problem.

I am able to format the SD cards from within the app successfully. Some I have re-formatted and some I have not. All 7 V3 cameras are behaving the exact same way. I deleted and re-installed the app on both my iPad and iPhone. When a similar (but not exact) problem occurred with the Flood Pro cameras, someone else was the first to report the issue, but it took time for other people to join in and then several more weeks for Wyze to fix it. Once it was fixed, that is when we started having this issue with the V3 cameras.

My next troubleshooting step is to have someone test the problem with an Android phone. The reason is how the troubleshooting process went with the Flood Pro cameras on the forum. The problem was - users were reporting that they could not access the SD card at all. I got those users to list what devices they were using to access. Android users were OK. Even some iPad and iPhones were OK, but particular models of iPhones and iPads could not access the SD cards to view at all, including mine Everyone with iPads and iPhones were on the same IOS. The app did not crash, but it gave an error when trying to access the SD card. You could format the SD card, but that was all you could do with it.

Firmware updates to the cameras did not eventually fix this issue, it was either an app update or something Wyze fixed internally. I was watching it closely. I am seeing reports of other SD card issues currently being reported with other cameras that are somewhat different. I see people saying they are buying new SD cards and that is not resolving their particular problem with the Pan cameras. I am following the most logical path in accordance with the history of SD card problems to inform Wyze on this issue. This problem is going to be related to the camera model and the device trying to access the video. They fix one problem for one camera model and device accessing it and it breaks another. It is not easy to support every tablet and smart phone model out there.

My next post will be about the results of an Android phone accessing the SD cards.

Let see if this would be any useful info. I have six V3’s and one V4. The V3s have been updated to beta firmware 4.36.14.2506 and the V4 is on 4.52.9.1134. I use the app version 3.3.0 (6) on an iPhone 11 with iOS 18.2.1, on an iPad (5th Generation) with iOS 16.7.10 and on a M2 MacMini with Mac OS 15.3. No issues whatsoever accessing, playing and saving videos from SD card from any of the three devices Wyze App 3.3.0 (6) is running on.

1 Like

Thank you this IS very useful. I am on iPad 7th Generation and this is very interesting indeed as those using 5th Generation iPad did not experience the problem with the Flood Pro cameras and I did. Running IOS 18.1.1. My iPhone is experiencing this problem, It is an iPhone 13 Mini, IOS 18.1.1. Running Wyze app 3.3.0(6)

I will add testing of a 5th Generation iPad to my troubleshooting list.

Have you tried updating to iOS 18.2.1 ?

I have iOS 18.3 on my 4th Gen iPad Pro and my SE2020 iPhone and have never had any issues with SD cards in my WYZE Cams, reading/writing/ viewing or formatting.

1 Like

Have you tried taking one card out and formatting in a computer, ideally using SD card formatter from sdcard.org like I mentioned earlier in the thread?

Worth a try, a power outage could have corrupted the file system on all your cards, or even an app glitch or firmware update could have done it. The internal formatter in the app has been known to be less than perfect.

I have isolated the problem through testing on different devices. Testing on Android - no problem, I can move through the SD card without crashing. Same result on a 1st generation iPad. Access to the SD cards on all 7 of our V3 cameras work fine to move through the video without crashing. I updated my 7th generation iPad to IOS 18.3, which is the latest. It crashed the app when I tried to scroll through the video, same as before. Same with my iPhone 13. This is a problem that Wyze willl have to fix on their end - there is nothing more I can do on my end. As I said - it is NOT the SD cards because they work fine with other tablets or smartphone models. And as I said before, a similar, but not exact problem happened with the Flood Pro cameras - and the same devices were involved. And it was not just my particular tablet and iPhone, other people were also reporting the problem on that thread. Generation 7 iPads and iPhone 13s were a problem. 5th generation iPads were also reported to work OK in that thread, same as reported by another user here. So please, no more stuff about it being the SD cards. Thanks.

If you come and ask for suggestions and help, people are welcome to make those requested suggestions. Is it that big of a deal to try it just to see and eliminate a possibility? Either way, your call obviously. Just seems pointless to ask for input from other users then discard it and say you know what the problem is. Why even ask then?

Also just tested an iPhone 8 - that is working fine.

I have demonstrated the problem to show that the problem is definitely related to the device you are using to access the SD card here: https://youtu.be/m9E3We15rsg

The same thing is happening with all my V3 cameras.

Could be, if the day of the week ends in ‘y’. Never had to replace a micro SD card in 9 cams since purchase in 2019. I don’t even use endurance cards. Luck? Maybe.

I’m having the exact same problem (app crashes when trying to playback)… iPhone 16 updated to the latest version as of today.